In fact, just hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the White House website touted a misleading crime statistic. On a page entitled "Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community," the White House bemoaned the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America" and that "killings have risen by 50 percent" in Washington, D.C.
There were 135 homicides in the nation's capital — a 17 percent decrease from the previous year, according to D.C. metro data from 2016. In a statement to VICE News, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department also pointed out that violent crime overall dropped by 10 percent last year.
It's possible that the Trump administration mistakenly cited an old statistic — in 2015, murders increased by approximately 50 percent from the previous year. That year, however, was an outlier in a steady two-decade decline in violent crime in the district. Regardless, the White House website was amended Wednesday morning to say instead that "killings have risen by 50 percent in the past four years."
"I can't think of a time in my adult life where the White House puts something out and you start with wondering if there's any truthful basis for it," said Philip Stinson, a professor of criminology at Bowling Green State University who has collected extensive data about police misconduct. "It's bizarre that the facts don't matter, science doesn't matter, and good data doesn't matter. There seems to be a very cavalier attitude [in the White House] for the purpose of creating confusion."
Other statistics cited by the White House fail to tell the whole truth. "In 2015, homicides increased by 17 percent in America's fifty largest cities," the same page reads. "That's the largest increase in 25 years." PolitiFact did the math, however, and determined this statement to be "mostly true." Homicides did spike in 2015, and preliminary FBI data for the first half of 2016 also reflect an increase in overall violent crime — but those figures fail to convey the broader downward trend in violence over the past two decades.
"It's very misleading to point to outliers and use them to make a point," Stinson said. "It sets a dangerous precedent, and that's what everyone's worried about."
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"I don't know if you could accuse them of fudging, but there's no 'carnage' here," James Lynch, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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"We're still talking about historically low murder rates," Lynch said.