A law enforcement expert is poking holes in the now-former Biden administration Department of Justice’s repeated claims that violent crime sank to a 50-year record low, saying the agency “manipulated data” to reach its conclusion.
In 2024, the Biden administration repeatedly claimed that violent crime was at a 50-year low, based on FBI statistics. The FBI defines the following as “violent crime”: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
But Ken Alexandrow, a security expert who served for 26 years as a Nashville, Tennessee, police officer, said the former administration “manipulated data” to reach a certain outcome.
“The way crime statistics are developed is that police departments around the nation send all their category 1 crimes, which are violent crimes, to the FBI. And then the FBI develops nationwide statistics,” Alexandrow said. “But the changes happen when a new administration comes in, and they change the reporting conditions.”
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Then-President Joe Biden listens to his introduction before speaking to police chiefs from across the country and members of his administration at the White House on Feb. 28, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Change of reporting programs
The Biden administration did just that, Alexandrow alleged. He said the administration changed reporting from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
“If you ask anybody on the street, no one will tell you that they feel safer or that crime is going down. However, it’s the job of any leader, whether they’re local, state or federal, to make your constituency feel safe. So how can we do that? Well, several police chiefs and city managers have been in trouble for manipulating stats,” he said.
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Alexandrow, who founded Agape Tactical LLC, said police departments will remove “pieces of the pie” to show constituents that crime is going down.
“A city may remove domestic murders one year, and then the next they’ll remove drug-related murders so they’re taking two pieces of the pie out,” he said. “So to manipulate their statistics, they take sections of the population out to prove that they’re doing their job.”
“The government has done the same thing by changing the way that crime is reported,” he said.
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik/File)
Percentage of police departments not reporting
He said that in 2023, 70% of police departments that were reporting under the UCR program stopped reporting under the NIBRS program.
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“And keep in mind, those are cities, including L.A., Chicago and New York City, along with 45% of Florida departments, not reporting,” he said. “When you have these major cities not reporting, you’re going to have a tremendous drop in crimes and, therefore, your statistics and your percentages will drop.”
“When you have these major cities not reporting, you’re going to have a tremendous drop in crimes …”
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during his farewell ceremony at the Department of Justice in Washington on Jan. 16, 2025. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
In 2024, the Biden-Harris’ DOJ reported a 17.5% decrease in murder rates. There was also a 7.1% decrease in rape, 3.6% decrease in aggravated assault and 7.8% decline in robbery over the first three quarters of the year.
Between 2021 and 2022, violent crime decreased by 1.7%, which became a 3% decrease between 2022 and 2023; and through the second quarter of 2023 to 2024, it went down by 10.3%. In the same time period, the murder rate went down by 6.1%, starting from 2021 to 2022, by 11.6% in 2023 and finally by 22.7% in 2024.
The DOJ noted that the data was from 85 cities. They did not specify which cities reported.
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Then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris are shown at the White House on April 11, 2022. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Biden admin previously shifting crime stats
In 2022, the Biden administration’s FBI quietly updated its crime data to show an increase in violent crimes despite previous data showing violent crimes had fallen that year, which was touted as a victory for the administration.
The data was lauded by Democrats and the media as part of a turning point for crime woes in the U.S. after the crime wave of 2020, when defund-the-police protests and riots swept the nation and the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders upended daily life.
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Fox News Digital has reached out to the DOJ, the New York City Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicago Police Department for comment.
Fox News’ David Spunt and Emma Colton contributed to this report.
