“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”
For months, the news media has relied on FBI data to relentlessly push this claim. But the problem is that the FBI data only counts crime reported to police, not total crime, and even then, it does a poor job of measuring reported crime.
Buttigieg dared viewers to “do yourself a favor and look up the data.” But Buttigieg either doesn’t understand the crime data or he is really hoping that Americans don’t take him up on his dare.
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