[A really solid piece of data journalism, taking a more nuanced look at violent crime trends than either political party does. -egg]
In his speech accepting his party’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in July, Donald Trump proclaimed that “Our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment for everyone than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.”
But days later when the Democrats gathered for their convention in Philadelphia, President Obama responded, “Donald Trump calls [America] ‘a divided crime scene’ that only he can fix. It doesn’t matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they’ve been in decades…”
So who is right: Trump or Obama? Are we in the throes of a crime wave sweeping across the nation, or is this a period of stability and safety unlike any we’ve seen in a generation?
The Marshall Project used a widely accepted statistical calculation to get a weighted average of recent years — essentially smoothing out the year-to-year fluctuations that are common to crime data. We found that the reported violent crimes rose in our cities last year to its highest point since 2010. But viewed in the broader context of the past five decades, crime remains near record lows. Note that we focused on cities, where crime is most prevalent, excluding more affluent suburbs or the sparsely developed rural areas that make up the rest of the country.