During the September 10 presidential debate, Trump was fact-checked by ABC News anchor David Muir, who noted that “the FBI says violent crime overall is declining in this country.” In 2021, the FBI transitioned to a new crime data collection system – the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) – and discontinued its Summary Reporting System (SRS).

When Donald Trump said during the debate that crime had increased in the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, he was fact-checked. MAGA supporters said Wednesday that the FBI had quietly adjusted its 2022 numbers in recent weeks — after the debate and new numbers showed Trump was right.
The new figures, first released by RealClearInvestigations (RCI), show that the raw number of violent crimes – including murders, assaults and rapes – rose from 1,197,930 in 2021 to 1,256,671 in 2022, an increase of 4.9 percent.
In October 2023, the FBI issued a press release releasing its 2022 national crime data, stating that “national violent crime decreased by an estimated 1.7 percent in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”
“I reviewed total violent crime data from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, an economics professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in crime research, 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 huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without explanation, make it difficult to trust FBI dataMoody added.
Elon Musk even said the latest FBI crime data The problem is “massively underestimated”.

MAGA supporters claimed Donald Trump was right about the crime data in the ABC News debate

The FBI's revision of crime statistics shows how much guesswork is involved in even the “final” numbers often embraced by politicians. The FBI doesn't just count reported crimes. Instead, it provides estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial annual data. The office also produces estimates for cities that do not report data. The FBI's method of producing these estimates changes over time and affects the numbers they report, RCI said.