Crime has declined since Donald Trump was president. He insists on lying about that.
Former President Donald Trump, in his weeklong attempt to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention, visited Michigan on Tuesday to accuse Vice President Kamala Harris of being soft on crime.
Hold on.
I get that your first thought here might be, "Why would a convicted felon like Trump think he can go after a former prosecutor like Harris on crime?"
Here's why: Trump has a sliver of statistics to offer and a national sentiment that tends to see crime as a much larger issue than it really is. So first, let's get a few simple truths out here in the conversation:
Crime rates have been steadily falling in America since the early 1990s but did see a significant increase, especially in murder, in 2020 during Trump's last year as president as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the country. The decline in crime rates resumed after he left office.
That's great for America, but not so great for Trump's nonstop melodramatic claims that the country is some dystopian hellscape and only by returning him to power can we live in peace and prosperity again.
That's bunk. Here's why.
Trump and his campaign pick pieces out of a larger crime puzzle
Trump on Tuesday claimed that Harris, as vice president, "presided over a 43% increase in violent crime."
His campaign later told me that he referred to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that showed a 42% increase in nonfatal violent crime in 2022. That September report, which is now nearly a year old, also noted that the particular rate of crime had just reached "a 30-year low" during President Joe Biden's first year in office.
No surprise that Trump left that part out of his speech.
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Crime statistics are gathered two ways in America: The FBI collects reports from local law enforcement agencies while the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts surveys each year of a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people.
Trump really grabbed hold of the second method this week. Why? Because the first method, conducted by the FBI, debunks his lies about America being caught in some terrible, prolonged crime wave.
The FBI data shows crime rates falling in 2022. The bureau's report for 2023 is expected to be released this October.
Of course, Trump then attacks the FBI for reporting factually about crime
If you're Trump and a federal agency's data disproves your claim, what do you do? You attack the agency, of course.
Trump has repeatedly derided the FBI data as "fake numbers" because of a change the agency made in 2021 in how those reports are compiled. That change was long in the planning but happened in the middle of a pandemic, and some law enforcement agencies didn't immediately switch to the new way of reporting to the FBI.
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Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center For Justice, told me the FBI faced "a data hiccup in 2021" and addressed the problem by collecting information through its previous system and the new system for 2022 and 2023.
Grawert noted that the murder rate is a reliable data point in this discussion because, unlike other crimes, "murder is pretty much always reported." And "murder is one of the offenses that's falling fastest nationwide," he said.
"We have very, very good reason to believe that violent crime is falling in 2023 and 2024 very fast, offsetting much, if not all, of the increase in violence we saw in 2020," Grawert told me. "And nothing President Trump said (in Michigan Tuesday) really undermines that."
Truth is crime reporting happens at a slower pace than political rhetoric
Trump won't let facts get in the way of a horrible story. He suggested on Tuesday that the average American out shopping for a loaf of bread faces a threat of being robbed or shot or raped.
Do you have a loaf of bread in your house right now? If so, did you face an arduous and dangerous journey to obtain it?
Trump is leaning hard on a standard American perception that has been true since long before he entered politics. We tend to believe that the national crime rate is worse than the data shows, even when we don't see crime as a major threat closer to home.
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John Gramlich, an associate director at Pew Research Center, told me that long-standing sentiment was typically stronger in Republicans but has recently become more bipartisan, even as the data shows crime rates are falling.
"Republicans are almost always more likely than Democrats to be concerned about crime or to prioritize the crime issue," Gramlich said. "But what's interesting is that people in both parties have become more concerned about it since the beginning of the Biden administration."
One factor might be helping to prompt that: Crime data takes time to compile. Politics is happening around us every day. Gramlich said a temporary "vacuum" of data can allow "misperceptions to fill the void."
"An election is a very fluid discussion about what's happening right now," he told me, and the lag for the data to catch up "can sometimes be filled with misinformation or fear or any number of other things."
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That's why Trump was in Michigan this week claiming that Harris "will deliver crime, chaos, destruction and death" if she is elected president.
He held what looked like a healthy lead in the race until last month, when Biden dropped his bid for a second term and endorsed Harris.
Trump, now watching Harris surge with momentum, has been counterprogramming this week by prophesizing America's doom. The politician who used to say "only I can fix it" is on the ropes and now is road-testing the rhetoric of "only I can save America."
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Trump was president when the crime rates spiked in 2020. That doesn't mean he's to blame for that. He certainly wouldn't accept responsibility for it (or anything else).
Now he's trying to hang one sliver of statistics on Harris as she pulls ahead of him in the presidential race. Think about that and then ask yourself this: Do you feel safe shopping for a loaf of bread right now in your community? If you do, consider the possibility that people all across America probably feel that way, too.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump builds his MAGA scare tactics on lies about crime in America
