J Edgar Boozer Padding Arrest Stats to Look Better

Thursday, May 14, 2026

FBI Director Kash Patel strutted into a Senate hearing Tuesday, brandishing a large black placard of statistics and daring his critics to dispute them. But current and former law enforcement officials say those numbers are a sham. "They are absolutely padding the stats and claiming arrests they would not have claimed [previously]," one current FBI official told MS NOW. "So comparing 2025 to 2024 is not apples to apples."

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Patel told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that his bureau had arrested "45,000 violent offenders last year, twice as many as 2024." What he didn't mention: his own FBI quietly rewrote the rules on what counts as an FBI arrest.

At Patel's direction, field offices were instructed to count as FBI arrests any suspects detained when bureau agents were merely present " even when another federal agency or local police department led the case and made the actual arrest. That policy generated massive statistical spikes beginning in late 2025, when thousands of FBI agents were deployed alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in targeted sweeps of cities including Minneapolis and Memphis.

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