Donald Trump

At the Presidential Debate, Trump Again Falsely Claimed Crime Is Rising

Violent crime dropped in 2023 and appears to be on track for another large decline this year.

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Trump | Michael Le Brecht II/ZUMA Press/Newscom
(Michael Le Brecht II/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

During Tuesday's presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that crime is rising.

Crime has been going down everywhere else around the world, Trump said at ABC News' debate in Philadelphia, but "crime in this country is through the roof."

In fact, the 2020 crime wave has been receding for the past two years. Violent crime dropped in 2022 and 2023 and, according to preliminary data, is on track for another steep drop in 2024. The FBI's Quarterly Uniform Crime Report for the first quarter of 2024 reported that overall violent crime decreased by 15 percent nationally compared to the first quarter of 2023.

Debate moderators cited the FBI numbers, but Trump does not consider them reliable. "They were defrauding statements," Trump shot back. "They didn't include the cities with the worst crimes. It was a fraud."

The FBI data are far from perfect, but they track with other early data from 2024. The Major Cities Chiefs Association released first-quarter data in May, based on a survey of 68 major metropolitan police departments, showing a 17 percent drop in murder.

"A murder decline of even half the magnitude suggested by the early 2024 data," wrote Jeff Asher, a data analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics, "would place the US murder rate this year largely on par with or below where it was from 2015 to 2019 prior to the surge in murder in 2020."

As Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote last month, Trump's repeated claims that "homicides are skyrocketing" simply do not hold water, no matter which way you slice the stats.

"The Trump campaign describes the FBI's quarterly numbers as 'garbage' and 'fake statistics,'" Sullum wrote. "But notwithstanding the preliminary nature of those numbers and the challenges associated with the transition to the new reporting system, they are broadly consistent, in direction if not magnitude, with what other sources indicate."

Politicians should be celebrating a safer America rather than stoking fear and rolling back criminal justice reforms based on a spike in crime that is already in the rearview mirror.