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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.
By former President Donald J. Trump’s account, the country is awash in crime. But in fact, under President Biden, the rate of violent crime has fallen.
It is a refrain that dates to Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, when he often cited false statistics to claim historically high murder rates and record-breaking urban crime. After he was elected, those warnings waned, even though the country had its biggest one-year increase in murder in 2020, when he was in office.
Once he lost that election, though, Mr. Trump wasted no time in falsely claiming crime records, saying in a 2022 address that “our country is now a cesspool of crime.”
In making the case for a second term, Mr. Trump has stuck to that message, though his argument has evolved this election cycle from false claims on crime rates to an attack on the credibility of any evidence that refutes him. Here’s how.
March 2, 2024
Mr. Trump selectively homes in on crime in cities, including at a rally in Greensboro, N.C.
Mr. Trump had a point that violent crime in Washington had increased in 2023. But it was one of few outliers. Violent crime overall decreased across the country by 3 percent, and the number of homicides declined on average by 10 percent across 32 cities tracked by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. In Washington and seven other cities, though, the number of homicides increased.
April 13, 2024
Mr. Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania, falsely balloons the level of crime in New York.
Crime, in fact, decreased in the year before March 2024 by 5 percent, and murders by 19.4 percent, the city reported just days before Mr. Trump’s remarks. And in 2023, overall crime declined by 0.3 percent and murders by 11.9 percent, to 386 in 2023 from 438 in 2022.
Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.
May 18, 2024
As the general election nears, his claims grow more hyperbolic.
“There’s too much crime in the country. We’ve never seen crime like this before.”
Mr. Trump, in an interview with a Dallas news station, warns more broadly of a nationwide crime wave. That is false. Violent crime and property crime are near the lowest level in decades, despite public perception to the contrary. And while there was an increase in crime during the pandemic, violent crime was higher in 2020 under Mr. Trump than under Mr. Biden so far.
May 18, 2024
That same day, he attributes the increase to Democratic policies.
Speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump vividly and baselessly casts blame on his political opponents.
June 15, 2024
Mr. Trump wrongly blames methodological changes for obscuring crime trends.
The claim, made at a conservative gathering in Detroit, is misleading. Days earlier, the F.B.I. released a preliminary assessment estimating that crime had fallen in the first three months of 2024. But Mr. Trump insisted the data was fraudulent.
In 2021, the F.B.I. started relying on a new data collection system, aggregating crime data from local and state police departments. Many agencies had yet to fully transition, resulting in reporting from only 68 percent of agencies, which covered about 66 percent of the population. So Mr. Trump has a point that data collection in 2021 was unusually incomplete, but the reported national crime rate that year did not simply omit a third of the country, as he said. Rather, the F.B.I. used a standard statistical process to fill in the blanks and estimate crime for the missing jurisdictions to generate a national rate.
The F.B.I.’s national estimates included data from more agencies in subsequent years: 93.5 percent of the population in 2022 and 94.3 percent in 2023. Both years continued to show a decline in crime compared with 2020.
June 22, 2024
At a rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump insists that the official statistics are “fake.”
“The F.B.I. crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake.”
Minutes later, he points to a different data set, also from the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump was cherry-picking those statistics and referring to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which showed a 43 percent increase in the violent crime rate, from 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 to 23.5 in 2022. (Unlike the F.B.I.’s crime rate, which relies on crimes reported to the police, this rate relies on responses to a survey.)
Left unsaid: The 2022 rate was comparable to rates under the Trump administration (23.2 in 2018 and 21.0 in 2019) and still lower than rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, in 2023, that rate declined to 22.5 per 1,000 people.
Aug. 3, 2024
He repeats those percentages during a rally in Atlanta.
“Nationwide, there’s been a 43 percent increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58 percent increase in rape, 89 percent increase in aggravated assault and a 56 percent increase in stone-cold robbery.”
Sept. 6, 2024
Addressing the Fraternal Order of Police union in Charlotte, N.C., he again cites those figures.
“Since Kamala Harris took office, she has presided over a 43 percent increase in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in rape and an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault.”
Sept. 10, 2024
Mr. Trump reprises his claims during the presidential debate.
Sept. 18, 2024
In a Fox News interview, Mr. Trump inaccurately cites an analysis to claim a huge increase in crime.
“I was right. The following day, D.O.J. announced numbers — I don’t know who it was in D.O.J., but somebody over there likes me — that crime is up 45 percent, murders up, numbers like you wouldn’t even believe.”
Since the debate, Mr. Trump has seized upon and further inflated an analysis repeated in conservative news outlets of revised F.B.I. statistics.
In its September report estimating that violent crime had declined by 3 percent in 2023, the F.B.I. released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions, according to an analysis published by Fox News, show a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022.
But even that 4.5 percent figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has noted. That is because crime data from 2021 was incomplete, as police departments across the country transitioned to a different reporting system. Moreover, the revised data still show that violent crime had declined overall since 2020.
This dark assessment of soaring violence and lawlessness under Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris has been central to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — even though the facts show otherwise.