Were Donald Trump’s “pants on fire” when he said that “crime is rising,” as the fact-checking group Politifact ruled? Not really, Eugene Volokh argues at his Volokh Conspiracy blog. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Sean Kennedy has shown, there is serious evidence that violent crime did in fact rise in calendar year 2015 and that it has been rising so far in calendar year 2016.
Volokh, a professor at UCLA Law School, argues that Politifact should have issued a statement along the following lines: “The violent crime rate has plummeted in the past 25 years, and while it may have been increasing in the last year and a quarter, that could easily be an anomaly, and our data on that are just preliminary and may not be sound.” That would perhaps have justified a ruling that Trump’s words were partially false, or at least did not provide a full picture of what is happening.
As I’ve written in a previous blog post, liberals have had a tendency to downplay statistics which suggest an alarming rise in violent crime in multiple major cities. Politifact seems to be operating in the same tradition. It’s not clear that we’re seeing a repeat of the situation in the decade 1965-75, when violent crime roughly tripled. But it’s not clear either that we’re not. Sober analysts should state carefully what they do know, and the limits of their knowledge. Yes, violent crime has declined sharply over the last 25 years — a wonderful achievement, the causes of which I think no one entirely understands. But there is no guarantee that that achievement is permanent, or that it cannot be reversed — and there are some disturbing indications suggesting that we are seeing such a reversal.
