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By The New York Post Editorial Board

When the FBI released its “final” crime numbers for 2022 last September, progressives around the country cheered because they showed a drop in overall national violent crime.

Just one problem: The 2022 numbers were 100% fake, which means we have no reason to believe the 2023 numbers the bureau’s put out.

The only reason we know this is that an eagle-eyed observer spotted an oblique reference to an “update” on the bureau’s website — which belatedly turned that 2022 crime drop into a crime increase.

They assured us the 2022 and 2023 figures proved there was no need to worry about the pro-crime policies implemented by woke DAs and legislatures around the nation.

The crime-lovers owe Trump and everyone else they lied to and endangered an apology.

Now, thanks to that on-the-sly “update,” it’s clear crime has been rising, not falling, just as Trump and other people still in touch with reality observed.

Per the Federal Bureau of Incompetence’s initial data, the 2022 data allegedly showed a violent-crime rate drop of 2.1% year on year.

With the revision, they show violent crime going up nationally by 4.5%.

Meaning that thousands more rapes, murders and other serious crimes took place than the Justice Department initially claimed.

The total swing, 6.6 percentage points, was greater than the endlessly vaunted 3.5% drop reported by the FBI for 2023.

If we can believe the 2023 numbers at all, but we have no reason to.

Remember that over the past two decades the FBI’s crime data was largely not revised; the revisions that did occur were smaller than one percentage point.

Given that Justice is run by Merrick Garland, a Biden political lackey, it’s tempting to see the 2022 data as a deliberate ploy to help Joe by defanging a potent issue for the man he was then running against.

But let’s assume the FBI figures weren’t deliberately cooked; that means the bureau simply can’t manage statistics properly but acts as though it can.

Which is catastrophic: This isn’t a jobs-number revise but data around murders and rapes.

Aside from any argument about accuracy, the fake numbers are still awful.

They show that the murder rate, for example, as of 2023, is almost 10% higher than it was before 2020.

That fact alone should utterly silence the “let’s legalize crime to increase equity” freaks.

Good thing the FBI doesn’t have a monopoly on crime stats: The Census Department tracks them too, and those numbers showed a massive increase in crime for 2022, almost 30%, following on a near-14% increase for 2021.

They also show a 4.1% jump for 2023 — so get ready for another stealth “update” of that 3.5% drop the FBI claims happened.

Such inconvenient facts don’t matter to progs, who care nothing about urban decay — only about ideology.

No matter how many people have to die.