When accepting the Republican nomination in Cleveland last week, Donald Trump said:
Trump’s claims have drawn the ire of many in the media and some elected officials. Just a few weeks ago, Trump and President Barack Obama squared off over what exactly is happening on American streets.
Self-appointed “fact-checkers” at the Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, The Atlantic and Factcheck.org have all sided with Obama’s July 9, 2016 claim that:
Taken at face value, the Trump and Obama claims are at odds—either crime is up, flat, or down. But as with most things, it’s never that simple and the media “fact-checkers” are too busy (or lazy) to check the data and far too eager to condemn Trump as playing fast and loose with the facts. As we pointed out in June, there’s more to the story than the fact-checkers let on.
What the fact-checkers get right is the long-term downward trend in crime from the 1960s (when the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system started in earnest) until 2014 (the last year of fully available data sets). Violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault combined) rose dramatically from 161 per 100,000 in 1960 to a peak in 1991 of 758 per 100,000 before falling to 365.5 per 100,000 residents in 2014.
What most of the fact-checkers and President Obama omit is that we actually do possess data beyond 2014. The truth is—and it depends on your definition of is—the most recent large city crime data shows that violent crime, particularly murder, is up significantly since 2014.
January to June 2015 data from the FBI finds homicide up 6.2 percent, rape up 9.6 percent while overall violent crime is up 1.7 percent from first half of 2014’s lows. (NB: The FBI changed the definition of rape to be more inclusive but has not revised backwards its data set, so this piece uses the “legacy” definition which the FBI still collects. But the new violent crime figure uses the new definition, which complicates comparing violent crime rates to past years.)
As Professor Rick Rosenfeld of University of Missouri-Saint Louis has documented in a study of 56 major cities, the amazing and unprecedented year-on-year decline in homicide rates over the past few decades was arrested and reversed during 2015. The Major Cities Police Chiefs Association broke the news in May that the first quarter of 2016 continued this new trend – with rising violent crime and homicides across urban centers. Just released data from MCCA Monday confirms that 2016 is a bloody, violent year. In major cities, homicides are up over 15 percent while overall violent crime is up 2.4 percent over first half 2015.
Our own research, based on local police department data that track crime in major cities up to the end of this past June, reveals that the trend continues, though not uniformly across the country.
If you combine the data sets, 19 of the 30 biggest cities have seen a significant rise in homicides over the past year.
The takeaway from all of this is that Trump and Obama are both right, but in different ways. Trump is right that crime is on the rise but Obama is also correct, even with our research, that Americans are safer now than at almost any point in the last 40 years.
So is rising crime a worthy campaign issue? The majority of Americans sure think so. According to a Gallup poll from April, 53 percent of Americans worry about crime and violence “a great deal,” the highest number of people to believe so since 9/11.
Trump, like any politician, is promising to solve the problems that his constituents want him to. Crime is still rising relative to the recent past, which understandably concerns many who, on other fronts, pine for a bygone era of safe streets, secure jobs, and a strong America abroad.
Trump’s rhetoric may not give a nuanced picture of the crime trends but neither do his critics give him credit for accurately identifying a real phenomenon—crime is rising and Americans can feel it.
Although, it remains unclear if this upward trend will continue but it is clear, as public polling and history suggest, anxiety about ‘law and order’ often finds its way into the voting booth.
Sean Kennedy is a writer and researcher in Washington DC. Parker Abt is a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
