"Our crime rate is going up," former President Trump claimed during the Republican National Convention last week, when he vowed to "Make America Safe Once Again." Yet the most notable recent increase in the homicide rate happened on Trump's watch, and violent crime reports have been falling since then. That gap between Republican rhetoric and reality corresponds with long-standing public perceptions of crime, which Americans routinely say is going up even when it is going down, reports Reason Trump is hoping to capitalize on that misperception as he campaigns on a promise to reverse a nonexistent trend by "restor[ing] law and order." Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen precipitously since 1993, when the homicide rate was 9.5 per 100,000 residents. By 2013, the rate was less than half that number.
Despite ups and downs since then, the homicide rate remains substantially lower than it was three decades ago. The same is true of robbery, aggravated assault, and property crime. The biggest recent spike in murders was seen in 2020, when the rate rose by a whopping 30 percent. It fell by about 7 percent in 2022, and preliminary estimates indicate that it fell again in 2023, by about 13 percent—one of the largest annual drops ever recorded. So far this year, according to data from more than 200 cities, the homicide rate is down by even more: about 19 percent. The major exception has been car theft, which rose by 4 percent in 2021 and by 10.4 percent in 2022. Fortunately for Trump, the data don't seem to have made much of an impression on most Americans. Last October, 77 percent of respondents told Gallup they believed crime had increased in the U..S. .compared to the previous year
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