Fact check’s unintended fact about violent crime (op-ed)

During the presidential debates Donald Trump said “inner city” crime rates in America were unacceptable. Trump mentioned the carnage in Chicago and insinuated crime rates were skyrocketing in crumbling black communities across the country.

Hillary Clinton was appalled by Trump’s nihilistic description of the black community and encouraged the American people to fact-check her opponent's remarks against the national data.

Trump continued his “inner city carnage” claims into his presidency.

As expected, there was a host of fact-checkers out to disprove Trump’s numbers out of fear of a draconian response and others were out to disprove the president’s numbers for partisan reasons alone.

But sometimes fact-checking can reveal unintended facts, especially when partisan zeal blinds the fact-checker to the big picture.

For example, Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration had a small controversy. It started with entertainers refusing to perform and democratic lawmakers boycotting the ceremony. Then it turned into a dispute about actual attendance. It was projected that Trump’s inauguration turnout would be the lowest in history. Of course, the administration was out to prove this was false. (Who wants to be last in history) But a lot of the headlines said the numbers were modest compared to the former president’s inauguration.

But here’s when the fact-checkers didn’t take the big picture into account.

President Barack Obama’s election was the biggest historical event in the 21^st century. Without getting into actual numbers you can imagine that President Obama’s inauguration was triple the average rate of attendance. Of course Trump’s numbers were modest by comparison.

Comparing Trump’s numbers to Obama’s won’t prove a low turnout, a low turnout can only be proved by comparing it to the average rate of attendance. (Trumps inauguration numbers surpassed George W. Bush and Bill Clinton’s election second inauguration.)

Recently there was a fact-checking report to disprove “Trump’s rhetoric on crime”. Once again, I’m not going to get into the accuracy of the numbers because it’s irrelevant once the big picture is placed into the equation. Now the big picture in the report was: Overall, violent crime is on a decade’s long decline since the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990’s.

This is no different than the inauguration comparison.

After President Obama’s historic inauguration the attendance numbers were going to drop dramatically regardless of who was elected. And the height of the crack cocaine epidemic was the most cataclysmic event in the inner cities in the twentieth century, if there is no longer an epidemic, of course the overall crime rates are in decline.

The report also issued a warning about percent changes in crime because they can exaggerate the magnitude of crimes in a city. “For example, the homicide rate in Austin increased by 68% in 2016, even though the actual number of homicides increased to 40 from 23. That’s a small fraction of the number of homicides in Chicago (from 478 in 2015 to 732 in 2016) yet Austin saw a bigger percentage increase than Chicago.” And the report also pointed out that “inner city” is not a category by which crime is measured. So a percentage can look worse than the actual body count in an area that isn’t a category.

Good to know.

But how does that negate Trump’s point that the current crime rates are unacceptable?

The fact-checks only prove the president is inaccurate about “inner city carnage” over the course of a decade, but the unintended fact remains, the current state of inner city violence is acceptable just as long as it’s under epidemic proportions.

But a lot of headlines say Trump is lying about crime.

In the old days there was a saying: There are lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics, now-a-days the saying should be: There’s falsehoods, fake news, and then there’s fact-check.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 3/8/17