More Misinformation From Biden Administration

Last week we learned that the FBI grossly under-reported violent crime data for 2022.  In October of 2023 the FBI issued a press release announcing that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.” The Biden administration took credit for this decline and, during the September 10 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, ABC moderator David Muir interrupted Trump’s statement that crime was increasing to tell the audience that the “FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”   Recently the FBI quietly revised its data for 2022 with new numbers showing that violent crime actually increased by 4.5% that year, meaning that several thousand more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults occurred.  Now, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has blatantly mischaracterized school discipline rates. The report entitled “K-12  Education Nationally, Black Girls Receive More Frequent and More Severe Discipline in School than Other Girls,” suggests that schools systematically punish black girls for misbehavior more severely than girls of other races for the same types of offenses.

An article by lawyer Hans Bader in Liberty Unyielding reports that the GAO report ignores reporting data from schools tracking student misbehavior.

The federal government’s own data shows black students don’t misbehave at the same rate as students of other races. Data from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) shows blacks are much more likely than whites to admit to getting into fights at school — 12.6% of blacks did so in 2015, compared to 5.6% percent of whites, according to page 87 of the NCES’s Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2016. (See Figure 13.2, Percentage of students in grades 9–12 who reported having been in a physical fight at least one time during the previous 12 months, by location and race/ethnicity: 2015).

Higher black misbehavior rates are not limited to fights, but extend to other areas of misbehavior as well. The Final Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety issued by the Departments of Education and Justice in 2018 pointed out that “research studies reveal that black youth, in comparison with their white counterparts, are . . . disproportionately involved in delinquency and crime (Earls, 1994; Hawkins, Laub, & Lauritsen, 1998), and are more likely to behave in ways that interfere with classroom and school functioning (Beaver, Wright, & DeLisi, 2011). These studies, and others from various disciplines, suggest that the school disciplinary rates may also reflect the problematic behaviors of black youth—problem behaviors that are imported into schools and into classrooms.” (See page 74, note 27).

Racial differences in suspension rates don’t prove racism, as appeals courts in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Richmond have noted. Differences in suspension rates partly reflect the fact that black kids are more likely to come from struggling, single-parent households that fail to instill discipline. As the liberal Brookings Institution conceded in 2017, “Black students are also more likely to come from family backgrounds associated with school behavior problems.”

The takeaway here is that the FBI was willing to put out false data to support the narrative that democrat policies are working to reduce crime, while the GAO chose to ignore data in its report to support the liberal/progressive narrative that America is awash with racism. Don’t believe me? Regarding the FBI the, New York Post reported:

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” College of William & Mary economics professor Carl Moody, who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” Moody added.

Right now, it is a mistake to trust any federal agency.