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.