In Trump-land, up is down, and down is up

In a meeting with law enforcement officials on February 7, 2017, President Trump once again spouted his unsupported claim that the murder rate in the US is ”higher than in 45 or 47 years”, and that ”the media won’t report on it, because it doesn’t suit them”. This claim of his, like so many other claims he has made and keeps making, is not only false, it is preposterous, and it has been debunked before, during his campaign. The simple explanation to why media doesn’t report on it is that it simply isn’t true.

Then why does he keep saying this? It suits his agenda, of course, because fear-mongering makes people ask for more security at the expense of liberty. But how did he even arrive at such a conclu­sion? The lie is very easily disproven. Even a cursory Google search will lead to official govern­ment publications which contain very comprehensive FBI statistics over the past decades for various US crime rates, of which homicide is one of the most widely published and quoted. Looking closely at the statistics for 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, it can be argued that the slight increase from 2014 to 2015 is the largest for quite some time. However, the overall rate has actually been dropping significantly for the past decades, and the homicide rate today is much, much lower than what it was in the 1990s. In fact, the rate of homicides was lower in 2015 than any historic year since 1970, despite the slight increase from 2014.

Was this simply an error in the President’s grasp of numbers? Did he conflate the rate of increase with the absolute number? It seems a bit far-fetched to assume that one of his advisors would make a big point of a small increase from a historically low level, and invite to this fatal and embarrassing misinterpretation. If we don’t look at numbers in a table, but at a graph, we clearly see that the murder rate has gone down, not up, for several decades.

However, the graph offers a different explanation for the error.

The murder rate in the US is now at the level it was back in 1970. Hence, it can be truthfully said that ”the murder rate is now back at the level it was 47 years ago”. If that statement from someone ana­lyzing the graph reaches the deluded mind of a person with a short attention span who very clearly needs to believe that there is ”carnage in the inner cities” and that USA is on the brink of collapse from rampant crime, it can easily be mis­interpreted as ”the murder rate hasn’t been this high for 47 years”. The actual fact is the opposite: the murder rate hasn’t been this low for 47 years.

The graph above shows the facts, as presen­ted by official FBI statistics. The blue curve is the actual facts. The red curve, which is flipped and has absolutely no relation whatsoever to reality, is President Trump’s personal upside-down version. It would be presumptuos to think that even Presi­dent Trump could literally make himself believe that ”up is down and down is up”, or to push such an obvious lie to the public, but a statement made in passing in a situation where he didn’t actually look at the graph himself could have been fatally misinterpreted and inextricably etched itself into his deeply prejudiced mind.

Whatever reason he may have to keep claiming this, it’s an untruth of Orwellian proportions.
The murder rate in the US is at its lowest for the past 47 years. Claiming the exact opposite is a lie.


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