Earlier this month, NBC News pushed the idea that crime had fallen overall last year, citing a “center-left” group called “Third Way” for their info. It was supposed to be a study meant to disprove Republicans who were pointing out that the crime waves hitting blue states was thanks to various Democrat Party-backed causes.

According to NBC News, experts indicated that Republicans were just being overdramatic:

“There seems to be a hysteria that began about a year and half ago to try and convince Americans that we’re undergoing another crime wave,” said Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice president for policy. “At a certain point, we just wanted to look at what the actual data was. And it doesn’t bear up.”

“What we’re seeing is really scant evidence of a crime wave,” he said.

In fact, according to Biden, the real problem lay with American gun laws.

However, new information has now been released that shows the “scant evidence” of a surge in crime wasn’t so scant after all. While property damage did see a drop thanks, in part, to COVID-19 keeping everyone indoors, violent crime skyrocketed.

According to Fox News, crime statistic experts pointed out that Third Way’s statistic tracking was “misleading at best” since their report combined seven types of violent crime and merged them together, then applied this to 22 states. NBC News took this info and reported this statistic.

Fox News asked a crime statistic expert to point out how they finagled the numbers to give them a good result for Democrat narratives:

But the statistic is “misleading at best,” Charles Fain Lehman, who works on the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News.

That’s because thefts are about four times more frequent than violent crimes, so the researchers’ decision to combine theft and violent crime together into one number, and to focus on that, effectively hides the rise of violent crime in cities.

“The trend in the total number of crimes is mostly the trend in larceny-theft … it’s not a particularly useful statistic,” Fain Lehman noted.

The reports acknowledged that murders and assaults rose, but their headline statistic buried the rises, as well as major differences between big cities and small towns.

The truth is that murders and assaults spiked after the media got ahold of the death of George Floyd and began pushing it on America relentlessly during the 2020 elections.

“Many cities saw spikes in the level of violence … in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests,” Fain Lehman explained.

These assaults and murders spiked and stayed high throughout the remainder of the year. It has yet to drop back down according to FBI statistics. These spikes, however, were primarily seen in large cities, while small towns saw these violent crimes drop.

The reason for the rise in crime in large cities also contained movements supported by the left:

Preliminary FBI data for 2020 show a big disparity in how different areas fared. Cities with more than a million people saw a 3.9% rise in violent crimes, and those with between 500,000 and a million saw a 5.8% rise. Towns with fewer than 10,000 residents saw a decrease of 5.2%. Large cities had more “defund the police” movements and related activism.

As Fox News pointed out, Third Way ignored these differences and even went so far as to focus on states instead of cities in an attempt to pass off some of the blame to Republican governors instead of Democrat mayors or county heads.

“Most criminal justice decision-making happens at the local level,” said Fain Lehman.

It didn’t help that police were either restricted from, or too afraid, to do their jobs.

“When police are sent a message that they are not going to be given a fair shake, they are going to be much less likely to be proactive and do what’s needed to decrease crime,” said Rafael Mangual, head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.

Fox News said Third Way has not responded to a request for a comment that was made on Monday.

It’s just another story about a Democrat activist group giving the Democrat-friendly mainstream media a false narrative to give to the people who had to endure these crimes that fall at the feet of Democrat leaders.