A pair of House Republicans demanded on Thursday that the FBI clarify the process by which it updates its crime statistics, accusing the bureau of giving off a false impression that crime has decreased in recent years.
Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) wrote in a letter to the FBI that they believed the bureau had quietly updated its statistics last year to include “thousands of murders, rapes and other violent crimes that were originally omitted from the FBI’s crime data.”
“The FBI did not mention this significant data revision in its press release about violent crime data for 2023,” Jordan and Biggs wrote.
The FBI provides a complex dashboard with historical crime data based on statistics it gathers from local law enforcement across the country. The bureau periodically distills the data into summaries that it releases annually. Its summary…
