Yeah, it is pretty surprising that just as Trump and his attorney general Jeff Sessions are screaming about an uptick in violent crime and gang crime and immigrant crime and opioid abuse and what-have-you, much of the data used to back up their assertions just happens to have been inexplicably removed from the annual FBI report summarizing such crimes. Mother Jones:
One of the main areas drastically cut back in the 2016 report was data on homicides. The report no longer contained information on the relationship between the victim and culprit, making it harder to track intimate partner and family violence. Data that would allow researchers to analyze gang- and drug-related homicides was likewise missing. The report did not include information on victim and offender age, sex, race, or ethnicity, nor did it specify which weapons were used in which circumstances. The FBI removed significant information on arrests, reducing the number of arrest tables from 51 to 7, according to FiveThirtyEight. Also gone is a breakdown of drug arrests by type of narcotic, preventing researchers from observing trends in arrests for opioids, a national health crisis that the Trump administration has made a priority.
Yes. Yes, that is odd.
Researchers who rely on that data are blasting the move, but not to worry, says the FBI: This new streamlining of data to include, well, less data has been in the works for years. And perhaps that is true, and perhaps it ain't, but it’s certainly been a fiasco either way:
In October, FiveThirtyEight reported that the data deletions were not made in consultation with the FBI’s Advisory Policy Board, which would normally have been consulted on changes to the crime report. Instead, the bureau’s public affairs office helped determine which tables to remove based on “web analytics to determine how often tables were viewed online,” according to a press release about the latest report.
I dunno. It seems like if you were launching a major administration push to declare the nation a violent drug-addled hellhole in need of some tough new laws, you'd want to broadly publicize the evidence of your claims. Or, at the least, not institute new hurdles to finding those numbers.
But it’s the central FBI defense that’s the strangest: the notion that all of this was done intentionally to “reduce the number of data tables in the reports.” All right, but why? Are we running out of tables? Do they make the PDFs look fat? It’s one of the most critical annual crime reports in the country, a tool intended not for the general public but for reporters, researchers, law enforcement agencies and others with a stake in analyzing such data: why in particular does it need to get smaller?