They say numbers don’t lie, but people often do. Just this past August, Erika McEntarfer, the former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—an agency once hailed as the gold standard of global economic measurement—was abruptly dismissed. Her firing follows a July jobs report showing that job growth had significantly slowed, an economic reality difficult to accept.

The Economic Policy Institute reports how many political figures claimed the agency intentionally manipulated statistics to fit a political narrative. The irony was not lost on observers: for decades now, the BLS published truthful, non-partisan economic data about America’s job markets. Yet when facts conflicted with politics, the messenger paid the price. 

The message is clear: inconvenient facts are expendable. Accusations of “rigging statistics” were declared without sufficient evidence; worse, the removal of a top official only deepened concerns about statistical manipulation.

But her firing raises a deeper question: Can facts be neutral at all?  What once seemed like a mere labor report is now the opening act for broader war on data itself.

And yet, these political declarations are just one of the many instances of changing facts to fit an agenda. The threat of falsified statistics continues to pervade throughout various states in America, each slowly unraveling the flaws in our political system.

As such, the issues do not just end at politics. Parallel to this situation are debates revolving around the alteration of crime statistics. Recently, the Washington D.C’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), has been accused of allegedly lowering violent crime rates, resulting in the ongoing investigation of D.C police commander Michael Pulliam. The whistleblower has claimed that leaders of the MPD have instructed their commanders “to routinely downgrade charges to artificially lower District crime statistics,” reporting felonies as misdemeanors and other lower crimes instead.

Such faulty reports include changing “a shooting, a stabbing, or a carjacking” into “a report for a theft or of an injured person to the hospital or of a felony assault,” felony assaults failing to be classified under a category of crime and therefore being neglected altogether. This places us under an illusion of safety, even when the dangers of crime are still as prominent as ever; worse, it leaves us in a position where we cannot trust the data from sources that are supposed to be the most reliable.

Furthermore, the data on the website demonstrates inconsistency. On July 15th, statistics indicated a 28% decrease of violent crime, but just three days later, the number shifted to 25%. The constant fluctuations of these numbers in this brief period of time only serve to further highlight the inaccuracies of crime data.

These fraudulent statistics spark new questions on the actual safety of not just Washington D.C., but our country as a whole. If police departments are controlling our perception of crime through data, how safe are we really? It seems that the danger not only includes the crimes and criminals themselves, but also the people reporting them for less than what they are.

By refusing to accept the economic measurements of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as the truth and firing its Commissioner, politicians are able to deny the weaknesses of their administrations. By undermining the intensity of some crimes and entirely ignoring others, the MPD has the opportunity to improve their public image and reputation. After all, they are in positions of power, and the odds appear to work in their favor.

But the lies that hide beneath these numbers are impossible to fully conceal, biting them back to reality—the reality that reputation can only be earned, not forged.

And it is only us who can illuminate this reality, double and triple checking the legitimacy of  information handed to us and pointing out the discrepancies in data that people in power often try to conceal and distort. By being vigilant and vetting the truth with reliable and trustworthy platforms of media and news, the truth and justice will ultimately prevail if we preserve and protect objective, impartial, and non-partisan agencies.