Trump repeatedly denounces rampant crime. Here's how his misleading claim changed.

In fact, crime fell 5 percent and murders fell 19.4 percent in the year leading up to March 2024, the city reported just days before Mr. Trump's comments. And in 2023, overall crime fell 0.3 percent and murders fell 11.9 percent, from 438 in 2022 to 386 in 2023.

Those numbers also pale in comparison to New York's crime peak in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay in the city and more than 1,500 murders a year were regularly recorded. The number of homicides peaked at 2,245 in 1990.

“There is too much crime in the country. We have never seen a crime like this before.”

Mr. Trump warned broadly of a nationwide crime wave in an interview with a Dallas news station. That's wrong. Violent and property crime are near their lowest levels in decades, despite public perceptions to the contrary. And while there has been a spike in crime during the pandemic, violent crime in 2020 was higher under Mr. Trump than it has been so far under Mr. Biden.

Speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump clearly and unfoundedly placed blame on his political opponents.

The claim, made at a conservative rally in Detroit, is misleading. Days earlier, the FBI released a preliminary assessment that estimated crime had declined in the first three months of 2024. But Mr Trump insisted the data was fake.

In 2021, the FBI began relying on a new data collection system that aggregates crime data from local and state police departments. Many agencies had yet to fully implement the transition, resulting in only 68 percent of agencies, covering about 66 percent of the population, reporting. So Mr. Trump is right that data collection in 2021 was unusually incomplete, but the reported national crime rate this year did not simply leave out a third of the country, as he said. Rather, the FBI used a standard statistical procedure to fill in the gaps and estimate crime for the missing jurisdictions to determine a national rate.

Data from other agencies were included in the FBI's national estimates in subsequent years: 93.5 percent of the population in 2022 and 94.3 percent in 2023. In both years there was still a decrease in crime compared to 2020.

“The FBI crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake.”

Mr. Trump cherry-picked these statistics, pointing to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey, which showed a 43 percent increase in the violent crime rate, from 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 to 23.5 in 2022 of the FBI is based on crimes reported to the police. This rate is based on survey responses.)

Unspoken: The rate in 2022 was comparable to rates under the Trump administration (23.2 in 2018 and 21.0 in 2019) and still lower than rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, this rate dropped to 22.5 per 1,000 people in 2023.

“Nationally, there has been a 43 percent increase in violent crime since I left office, including a 58 percent increase in rapes, an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault and a 56 percent increase in cold-blooded robberies.”

“Since taking office, Kamala Harris has caused a 43 percent increase in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in rape and an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault.”

“I was right. The next day the DOJ released numbers – I don't know who it was at the DOJ, but someone over there likes me – that crime was increasing 45 percent, Murders are rising, numbers you wouldn’t even believe.”

Since the debate, Mr. Trump has seized on and further inflated an analysis of revised FBI statistics repeated in conservative news outlets.

In its September report, which estimated that violent crime fell 3 percent in 2023, the FBI released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions show a 4.5 increase in violent crime, according to an analysis published by Fox News percent from 2021 to 2022.

But even that 4.5 percent figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has found. That's because 2021 crime data was incomplete as police departments across the country switched to a different reporting system. Additionally, the revised data still shows that overall violent crime has declined since 2020.

This grim assessment of increasing violence and lawlessness under Mr Biden and Ms Harris has been central to Mr Trump's re-election campaign – even as the facts show otherwise.