Someone's pants are on fire, yes, but it's not Donald Trump's. As AEI observes, Polifact checked figures only up to the end of 2014. That would be a year and a half ago. Now it's true crime statistics can be slow. But they're not that slow, as Polifact full well knew when it wrote its article. As AEI found:
Preliminary figures for 2015 are public but curiously the fact-checker doesn't cite them -- although the data were available in January 2016, well before the post was published. The FBI's preliminary 2015 figures actually do show crime rising in most categories across the country between 2014 and 2015. Violent crime (i.e. murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) is up. For example, the murder rate rose 6.2% in 2015, while rape rose 9.6%.
Indeed, the 2015 increase in murder is, as the National Institutes of Justice found, "real and nearly unprecedented."
But wait. It gets worse.
What do you think the chances are that Polifact actually didn't know that violent crime, and murder in particular (although not alone), was up in 2015 and up further this year? I'm no research genius, and I found both in about 25 seconds on Google.
So, yes, Polifact's tut-tutting of Trump is not just false. It's rigged. It is not realistically possible to believe Polifact took a pass on the last 18 months of crime statistics because it didn't know about them. It had a narrative to push, and it wasn't about to let data get in the way. (This is word-for-word the charge made daily against conservatives).
The Time article continues:
Major cities across the U.S. have experienced a surge in homicides in recent months,continuing a grim rise that began last year.
Murders are up in roughly 30 cities nationwide so far in 2016, according to data released by the Major Cities Chiefs Association on Friday. Nearly half of the cities surveyed showed increases in homicides in the first quarter of this year compared with 2015, when the murder rate in many U.S. cities rose after decades of decline. The data paints a varied picture: some cities have experienced a slight rise in murders, others have seen declines, while nearly a dozen metropolitan areas-including Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Memphis, Nashville, and San Antonio-have had sizable increases.
Yes, well, when you start a media-driven snarling campaign against the police, and continue to shrink the number of criminals in prison (a shrinkage now in its seventh straight year), what did you think was going to happen?
Let me put that another way: When you cut back on the things that helped you succeed, do you think renewed failure might be just around the corner?
Finally, let's take a look at the specifics of the violent crime rise (graphs found in the AEI article). AEI decided to take a look at local agency data for 2016 and compare it to 2014 and 2015 data. In short, overall violent crime in most major US cities, especially homicide, is up substantially since 2014.
![violentcrime_june19[1]](https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/violentcrime_june191.png)
![homicide_june19[1]](https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/homicide_june191.png)
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