Buttigieg’s Bold Crime Claim Doesn’t Hold Up
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By John R. Lott Jr.
Real Clear Wire
“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”
For months, the news media has relied on FBI data to relentlessly push this claim. But the problem is that the FBI data only counts crime reported to police,
