Busted: DeSantis' camp was told Florida's crime-reduction stats were bogus — but touted them anyway

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made a claim that crime in the Sunshine State is at a "50-year low" under his leadership a key selling point on the presidential campaign trail. But according to NBC News, staffers at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) told his camp that it wasn't true – and they ran with it anyway.

“The ethics of what we were reporting, we knew the numbers were bad,” said one FDLE employee. “We foot-stomped it to leadership over and over again; they did not care. They did not care.”

Multiple staffers told NBC that top officials at FDLE pressured departments to hand over numbers knowing they were incomplete, with another employee saying, “The numbers gave the governor and the [executive office of governor] what they wanted. They were looking for a particular narrative.”

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The issue stems from a recent change to Florida's crime reporting system. For decades, the state has used "summary" crime reports, meaning that a single incident with multiple crimes only reports the most serious crime. In 2021, the federal government ordered all states doing this to submit "incident-based" reports instead, which capture every crime in one incident — but several counties in Florida have not updated their systems yet and can't fully report their crime data.

Despite this, say staffers, FDLE leaders treated the numbers they did have as a comprehensive list of all crimes – knowing that it wasn't.

“The governor’s office wanted to say outright that we were at a 50-year crime low and we told department leadership, verbally and in writing, that was not accurate because of the deficiencies in the data,” said yet another staffer. “We went back and forth several times and we agreed, after being heavily pushed, to say we were trending in that direction.”

FDLE's spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger pushed back on the accusation, saying, “Florida’s crime rate is indeed at a 50-year low, and criticism about FDLE’s robust data collection methods is unfounded. Despite your assertions, no current or former employee has ever expressed concerns to FDLE leadership regarding the calculations.”

DeSantis was touted as the strongest alternative to former President Donald Trump for the 2024 nomination after he handily won re-election as governor last year, but voters and donors alike have soured on him after a series of campaign missteps, and he is trailing Trump by more than 40 points in the latest polling average.

A recent CNN poll in New Hampshire found DeSantis barely clinging to fifth place in that state, behind Trump, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.