Politics

Donald Trump's Statistics on Race and Homicide: 100% Wrong

The presidential candidate posted a graphic saying 81 percent of white victims in the U.S. were killed by blacks.

By Andrew McGill
Marvin Gentry / Reuters

Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump—or someone working on his behalf—fired off another incendiary tweet.

This one’s especially brazen, not only for its race-baiting statistics and clip-art, but also for its complete factual inaccuracy.

There is no such thing as the “Crime Statistics Bureau.” (The San Francisco police know nothing about this.) And the graphic’s figures are fictitious, if you trust the FBI’s 2014 Uniform Crime Report, which the original poster presumably does not.

Here’s what the FBI numbers actually indicate.

Yes, the FBI’s dataset is imperfect. Not every police department supplies victim data, making any analysis by definition incomplete. But the FBI’s report is still the standard resource for assessing these questions—for everyone except for a certain guy on the Internet running for president.

Andrew McGill is a former senior product manager at The Atlantic.