Donald Trump Staggeringly Wrong About Another Thing (Crime). Bet You're As Shocked As We Were!

These cutesy 'Abbey Road' recreations are getting out of hand

Donald Trump's alleged outreach to The Blacks (which he shouldn't need to do, since he already has a great relationship with The Blacks) continues apace, with this perfectly reasonable logic from the TrumpenTwittenMaschine Monday:

 
 Yeah, yeah, go on.

Would you be astonished to learn that this is not actually true, not even in the inner city? Go click the linky to that Atlantic article, which has a fun exercise for you! (It will not work here so save your clicking. No, stop that. It's a screenshot. Go to The Atlantic and come back.)

So we took our own guess, knowing that crime actually is down, and we did pretty good apart from forgetting that peak in the early '90s:

 
 We did better than 85 % of other guesses!

But you know what has gone up? FEAR of crime. As another Atlantic piece notes,

Americans’ attitudes about violence haven’t tracked actual crime rates over the last 15 years. Even though crime rates fell significantly between 2008 and 2012, there was never as steep a corresponding drop in concern, and worries have actually increased over the last couple years.

The fun statistical game Trump enjoys is pointing out that in some cities, murders are up, except he kind of lies a little bit there, too: He talks about increases in the last year. In boring old reality, some cities have seen increases, but not others, and even where crime is up, it's not "at record levels." Unless, like Donald Trump, you look at a sample size of one year, which as anyone knows, doesn't mean anything in terms of long-term trends, but can seem very scary. Fear is his product, after all.

If you watch lots of TV news, of course, you might definitely think crime is far worse than it is, and perpetrated far more often by blacks than by whites. Would you believe that the coverage of crimes committed by black suspects is vastly out of proportion to the actual crime rate? We suspect the guy who assumes that even people exonerated of crimes must nevertheless be criminals might not get that.

One thing that isn't happening? African-Americans flocking to Trump because he promises he'll bring safety at long last to their crime ridden ghettos, where you can't step outside lest you be hit in the constant crossfire from gangbangers. It's almost as if Donald Trump thinks TV is real. Maybe someone should turn on "Black-ish" for him sometime, so he can see some black people who don't live in the Projects in the 1970s.

[ Donald Trump on Twitter / Atlantic / Atlantic again / WaPo / Pacific Standard ]