Crime Will Likely Stay At Near-Historic Lows In 2016, Despite What Donald Trump Says

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claims that crime is “out of control.” As with most of what Trump says, the evidence isn’t really there.

A preliminary analysis released Monday by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice projects that crime rates will remain near an all-time low in 2016. The rates are expected to hover around last year’s numbers, increasing only slightly by 1.3 percent.

“These findings undercut media reports referring to crime as ‘out of control,’ or heralding a new nationwide crime wave,” the report says.

Trump, who bills himself as the “law and order candidate,” has sought since the beginning of his campaign to depict the U.S. as a violent, lawless country, teeming with murderers and Mexican rapists. The idea is to paint America as such a wretched place that voters will have no choice but to turn to Trump, with his promises of “I alone can fix it.”

The BCJ report comes just days after an analysis by The New York Times showing that murder rates increased in 25 of the nation’s 100 largest cities last year. Both the Brennan Center and the Times analysis note that there’s a lot of nuance to crime statistics ― especially homicide rates. Even if there have been localized increases of the kind seen in the Times report, it doesn’t necessarily mean crime is surging nationwide.

Trump, however, isn’t famous for his sensitivity to nuance. He repeatedly pushes “tough-on-crime” policies even though most Americans don’t support the methods.

Being harsher on crime can cause complaints of police harassment to rise. Poor and black people are disproportionately arrested and tend to serve extended sentences for minor offenses. And in any case, locking more people up does not cause crime rates to drop.

But there’s an audience for Trump’s claims, however misleading they might be. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe crime has increased nationwide in the past decade, according to an August poll conducted by The Huffington Post and YouGov. It hasn’t.

Much of the belief that crime is surging can probably be attributed to the ubiquity of mass media and social media in our lives ― something that wasn’t as much the case a decade ago. Individual crimes tend to receive massive amounts of attention on these platforms, which can have the effect of making America seem like a more dangerous and violent place than it really is.

There’s also the idea of a so-called “Ferguson effect” ― the theory that crime is up in some places because cops are hesitant to do their jobs now that police brutality has come under national scrutiny.

There’s not much reason to believe the “Ferguson effect” is real. And the Brennan Center found no uniform trend toward increases in crime. In fact, its researchers expect that some cities where crime rose last year will become safer in 2016.

Baltimore and Washington, two cities where a jump in homicides caused the national murder rate to rise in 2015, are projected to see murder rates decrease by 9.9 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively.

Some cities, like San Diego, will see an increased murder rate while overall crime drops, the BCJ predicts. Others, like Charlotte, North Carolina, will see an increase in overall crime while murder rates remain stable.

And like last year, some cities will most likely experience elevated rates of violent crime that will, in turn, bring the national rate up. Los Angeles and Chicago are expected to account for half of the 5.5 percent nationwide increase in violent crime. Chicago is projected to make up half of the 13.1 percent murder rate increase.

This, however, is not evidence of a national crime wave, since there may be certain factors causing crime to surge in these cities ― such as poverty, unemployment and segregated neighborhoods.

“Warnings of a coming crime wave may be provocative,” the report says, “but they are not supported by the evidence.”

Read the entire report below:

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.