During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, ABC News co-moderator David Muir stepped in to “fact check” GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on comments he made about how bad crime has gotten in the United States under the Biden-Harris administration.
“Crime here is up and through the roof,” Trump stated as Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris was shaking her head and disputing him. “Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.”
In response, Muir said, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
Trump fired back, correcting Muir:
“…the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud. “
Watch:
Trump was correct, as Crime Prevention Research Center president John R. Lott Jr. wrote in a detailed piece published the next day:
In fact, Trump was correct about the increase in crime under Biden. While violent crime fell by 17 percent under Trump, Biden has seen it rise by 43 percent.Muir doesn’t understand what the FBI is measuring. The FBI counts the number of crimes reported to police. Trump was right that less than half of police departments are now giving that data to the FBI, but, more importantly, Trump was discussing what was happening to total crime, not just the number of crimes reported to police.
But as it turns out, new data released by Joe Biden’s Dept. of Justice on Thursday essentially made Trump’s point for him:
The DOJ’s survey from the Bureau of Justice statistics is self-reported instances of violent crime over the last six months — meaning that it includes crimes that may not have been reported to police.The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.The highest recent rate of violent crime was in 2022, when the survey tracked 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12.The rate of rape increased from 1.2 per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023, while robbery went from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023, and aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023.
Trump talked about it in remarks given Friday:
The numbers he used come from an analysis done by Lott of the data from the most recent report and the 2014-2018 report:
Some Very Online Leftists, like Keith Olbermann, were in denial – and had to be set straight (language warning):
As the old Ben Shapiro saying goes, the facts don’t care about your feelings, and they definitely don’t care about the left’s/media’s feelings on this issue.
The full report can be read here.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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