Trumps Claims About Crime Spikes Are False, New FBI Report Shows

Just days after former President Donald Trump proclaimed on Truth Social that women are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, the FBI on Monday released a crime report stating that violent crimes, including murder and rape, plummeted in 2023.

The report found that national violent crime decreased roughly 3% in 2023 compared to 2022, and that murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down 11.6% overall compared to the previous year. The agency also reported that in 2023 alone, the number of rape offenses saw a drop-off of 9.4%. Aggravated assault decreased an estimated 2.8% last year, and robberies were down 0.3% nationally.

The Justice Department said in June that 2024 is on track to see a historic decline in violent crime compared to recent years. In the first quarter of 2024, for example, Attorney General Merrick Garland said violent crime in America dipped by more than 15% compared to the same quarter in 2023. Murder rates in 2024 have also dropped by over 26% compared to this same period last year.

Trump, however, has made crime and matters of border security a key plank in his 2024 presidential run.

All over the world crime is down all over the world, except here, he claimed during the debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, earlier this month. When debate moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump on the issue, Trump called the FBIs quarterly crime report from June which found that in the first three months of 2024, violent crime was down 15% compared to the same period last year, and murder was down by over 26% a fraud.

Trump, who was found guilty and convicted of 34 felony counts in May for falsifying business records in order to cover up his affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels, has regularly insisted that immigrants and asylum seekers are responsible for supposed increases in crime and violence.

But since 1960 according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research released in 2023 and revised in March 2024 immigrants and asylum seekers have been found to be 60% less likely to be incarcerated than all U.S.-born men, and 30% less likely to be incarcerated relative to white U.S.-born men.

Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told HuffPost on Monday that falsifications of crime statistics isnt just bad form from politicians eager to generate buzz. 

Data informs not just how policymakers react to crime but how members of the public perceive their communities and daily lives, Grawert said. It becomes much harder to understand what challenges our communities actually face, and to devise smart, timely solutions to those problems, when our leaders unreasonably question the reliability of government data.

The new FBI report draws data from law enforcement agencies across the U.S., and although not every police force in the nation responds to the FBIs Uniform Crime Reporting Program, some 16,000 entities do. They include various state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies. According to the FBI, the participating bodies cover 94.3% of all Americans, or roughly 316 million people.

In a statement responding to the FBI report Monday, President Joe Biden took some credit for the decline in violent crimes. 

When Vice President Harris and I took office, our nation had just seen the highest increase in murders ever recorded under the previous Administration, the president said. Immediately, we got to work passing the American Rescue Plan that led to the largest ever federal investment in public safety. Today, new data submitted to the FBI confirms again that Americans are safer than when we took office.

Harris also touted the achievements of the American Rescue Plan while noting that every single Republican in Congress voted against [it].

That bill , she said, delivered over $15 billion to cities and states to fund public safety and violence prevention strategies, hiring and keeping police officers on the beat while investing in community violence intervention and taking other critical steps to keep our families safe.

Americans are safer now than when we took office. Last year, we saw the largest ever one-year decrease in the homicide rate, which now stands 16% below its 2020 level, Harris said in a statement. Violent crime is at a near 50-year low. Our progress is continuing this year and builds on substantial decreases during the previous years of our administration.

Biden and Harris both said efforts to lower crime should continue into 2025 and beyond.

In particular, the president called on Congress to act on his proposed ban on assault weapons. Biden called for the bans passage after a mass shooting at a grade school in Nashville, Tennessee, last year, and brought it up again after the assassination attempt on Trump in July. But Democrats havent been able to shore up the votes needed to pass the measure, as Republicans have claimed that the issue is not guns but rather mental health crises or lapses in security by the Secret Service agents tasked to protect Trump.

Biden also called for a new round of investment in police forces, which would fund an additional 100,000 police officers nationwide and make for a strong Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he said.

Even as the Biden administration requests more police funding, it has been unable to move the needle on policy aimed at protecting Americans of color.

As HuffPost reported in May, the president urged Congress to act on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act , a police reform bill, on the fourth anniversary of George Floyds murder. It was first introduced in 2021.

The legislation proposes narrowing qualified immunity for police officers committing violence, placing restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and creating a database to track police misconduct nationwide.