Ignore the Deniers: The Murder Rate Is Up Significantly

For roughly two decades, the United States enjoyed a marked decline in its crime rates. Burglaries, murders, other violent crimes—they all fell steadily. That promising age ended as 2014 gave way to 2015. For the past two years, crime has been rising. And alarmingly, it is violent crimes—particularly murder—that have led the way.

In 2015, according to FBI data, murders ticked up a statistically significant 11 percent over the previous year. During the same period, assaults were up 5 percent and rapes increased 6 percent. The Brennan Center for Justice has confirmed that the troubling trend continued in 2016. (FBI data for 2016 have yet to be released.) The Brennan Center says murders were up 13.1 percent in 2016; this on top of the double-digit increase in 2015. In a two-year period, murders have risen by a quarter in the United States.

Yet despite this undeniable trend—and the suffering among our fellow citizens that it implies—there is a widespread impulse to minimize and wave away the problem. The reason for this morally noxious denial is no mystery. Donald Trump, both as candidate and now as president, has repeatedly—and correctly—raised the issue of America's rising murder rate. Because it was Trump who pointed out the facts, legions of liberal "fact checkers" and bloggers have leapt to the conclusion they must not be true.

The self-proclaimed fact-checking outfit PolitiFact was early out of the gate, awarding Trump a "pants on fire" rating in June 2016 for saying that "crime is rising." PolitiFact, however, cited 2014 data in making its case and, as an American Enterprise Institute scholar pointed out at the time, ignored readily available data on 2015 and early 2016 that showed crime increasing. Yet PolitiFact's legion of followers was not deterred: Any time Trump mentioned the rising crime rate, "fact checkers," brandishing outdated charts, called him a liar.

When outright denialism became untenable—the FBI data were irrefutable—the deniers switched tacks. Now, they decided, the crime rise was irrelevant, because it was largely confined to Chicago. "Chicago responsible for rise in U.S. murder rate," read one typical example, which strongly implied that there is no national crime problem—just a Chicago problem.