Former President Donald Trump has faced numerous “fact checks” during his campaign that have cited FBI statistics to show that violent crime in America is declining.

However, the agency has quietly updated its 2022 figures in recent weeks – and the new figures show that the number of violations has actually increased overall.

The apparent stealth edit of the agency’s statistics, first reported by RealClearInvestigations, shows that the raw number of violent crime incidents – including murders, assaults and rapes – rose from 1,197,930 in 2021 to 1,256,671 in 2022, an increase of 4.9%.

In October 2023, the FBI issued a press release unveiling its 2022 national crime data, which showed that “national violent crime is estimated to have decreased by 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”

The agency initially projected that the violent crime rate as a proportion of the U.S. population would have fallen 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021.

But the FBI’s adjustment now indicates that violent crimes increased by about 4.5% over the same period.

The upward revision was not mentioned in the agency’s annual crime rate press release from September of this year, which announced that violent crime would fall by about 3% year-over-year in 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center first identified the FBI’s subtle solution, citing a spreadsheet that broke down the original data.

“I checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, an economics professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “From 2004 to 2015 there were no revisions, and from 2016 to 2020 there were small changes of less than one percentage point.

“The massive changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” Moody added.

In 2021, the agency appears to have concluded that it overcounted violent crimes by 55,786 and undercounted by 24,243 in 2022.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the September 10 presidential debate, Trump was fact-checked by ABC News moderator David Muir, who noted that the “FBI says overall violent crime in this country is on the decline.”

Many of the fact-checks of Trump’s crime claims rely on FBI data, which has long faced questions about its reliability.

In 2021, the FBI transitioned to a new crime data collection system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and discontinued the Summary Reporting System (SRS).

NIBRS contains much more detailed crime information than SRS, but reporting by law enforcement has declined as municipalities apparently struggled with the transition.

According to one analysis, the FBI is missing data from about a fifth of key local agencies, while the reporting rate fell below 70% in 2021 for the first time in at least two decades.

In addition to the transition issues, some experts have raised concerns about the FBI’s data collection practices as being overly reliant on self-reporting of crimes that routinely go unreported.