WarSclerotic

On Crime, Trump’s Right and Polifact is Wrong, Power Line, Paul Mirengoff, June 21, 2016

These days, the mainstream media barely pretends to be other than anti-conservative and anti-Trump. But even by the MSM’s revoltingly low standards, Polifact’s analysis of Trump’s statement on crime is a disgrace.

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Polifact, a biased liberal operation that purports to fact-check political claims, recently examined Donald Trump’s statement that “crime is rising.” It found the claim to be false, rating it “pants on fire,” the worst rating these liberals dole out.

But Trump, in this instance, is correct. Crime is rising.

How did Polifact err on such a basic question? It erred by looking at no data past 2014. Sean Kennedy at AEI Ideas blows the whistle.

Trump made his statement on June 7, 2016. Thus, his claim that crime is rising can only be fact-checked by analyzing current data. By failing to do so, Polifact confirmed that it is either incompetent, hopelessly biased, or both.

Kennedy did what Polifact was obligated to do before proclaiming Trump a liar. He looked at data that would illuminate whether crime is increasing.

Specifically, Kennedy examined local agency data for 2016 and compared it to 2014 and 2015 data. He found that violent crime in most major US cities, especially homicide, is up substantially since 2014.

Kennedy also cites a March 2016 Gallup poll finding that 53 percent of Americans “personally worry about crime and violence…a great deal.” That’s up 14 percent since the question was last asked in 2014. This dramatic increase in concern surely reflects a change in the facts on the ground — i.e., increased crime and violence.

But Polifact’s bias and/or incompetence wasn’t limited to its failure to dig up 2016 data. Kennedy notes that the source Polifact did use — the FBI, per its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) database — provided preliminary figures for 2015.

The preliminary 2015 numbers show crime rising in most categories across the country between 2014 and 2015. Violent crime (i.e. murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) is up. The murder rate rose 6.2 percent; rape rose 9.6 percent.

This information was readily available as of January 2016, well before Polifact wrote its June hit piece on Trump.

Why didn’t Polifact use the preliminary 2015 data? The information was, of course, “preliminary.” But it still represented the FBI’s best estimate as to whether crime was increasing as of the beginning of 2016.

This data was sufficient to show that, at a minimum, Trump’s claim that “crime is rising” is plausible. I would say it shows he is probably right (and the 2016 numbers show he is right). Yet Polifact gave Trump’s statement the lowest possible rating for veracity.

These days, the mainstream media barely pretends to be other than anti-conservative and anti-Trump. But even by the MSM’s revoltingly low standards, Polifact’s analysis of Trump’s statement on crime is a disgrace.

This entry was posted on June 21, 2016 at 6:41 PM and is filed under Crime, Donald Trump, Media. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Crime, Donald Trump, Media