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Harley "Griff" Lofton's avatar

How nefarious! The FBI makes an ESTIMATE and subsequently revises them. The revision is characterized as "quiet" implying a lack of transparency according to the partisan hacks having taken over the oversight committee. Even though those revisions were publicly available when published.

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Greg's avatar

Trump lies, let's get that out of the way. But much of this essay is a demonstration of how one's biases lead one to interpret data which has many potentially different interpretations. You assert: "Before giving a fuller account of the crime rate, let me explain how criminologists like me make sense of the data and how we know that crime is down." But not all crime is down, and it's not down in all locations. And even if it is "down," a better question might be "from what baseline?" This is a big country with many potentially different outcomes/answers to the big questions: is crime a problem, what's the trendline, what works and what doesn't? You do your readers a disservice when you frame these important questions inside the binary framework anchored in Trump's dishonesty. I get that one of the zeitgeists of the UnPopulist is to oppose populism and DJT. It's a legit crusade. But I found more credibility in this piece from The Free Press:

"Vice President Kamala Harris has talked about how violent crime is at a 50-year low, a statement that, while largely accurate, came back to haunt her when the FBI recently updated its stats for 2022 and showed an increase over the previous year rather than a decrease.

"What’s the truth about crime in America? Are things worse? Or better? In a highly polarized election year, the answer is often: What do you want it to be?”

https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-harris-crime-fbi-statistics?utm_source=publication-search

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