President Trump continues to decry a record-high murder rate that doesn’t exist, CNN reports. Yesterday, he said during his meeting with sheriffs that, “the press doesn’t like to tell it like it is … The murder rate is the highest it’s been in I guess 45-47 years.” The reason there’s no reporting on a 45- or 47-year high murder rate is because the U.S. rate isn’t close to such record highs.
Trump repeatedly cited the faulty figure during his presidential campaign as he sought to paint the nation as besieged by crime unseen in decades, presenting his leadership as necessary to clean up the country. In 2015, the nation’s murder rate was lower than it was 45 years prior. The U.S. did experience its highest one-year increase in the murder rate in half a century between 2014 and 2015. The rate in 2015 was just 4.9 per 100,000 people. That figure is dwarfed by crime figures in the 1990s, when the murder rate hovered between 8 and 10 murders per 100,000 people.