Donald Trump returned to a topic he’s been citing often in recent months -- rising crime.

"We have a very divided nation," he said. "You look at Charlotte. You look at Baltimore. You look at the violence that's taking place in the inner cities. Chicago. You take a look at Washington, D.C. We have an increase in murder within our cities, the biggest in 45 years."

Trump is largely on target that "we have an increase in murder within our cities, the biggest in 45 years."

His staff didn’t respond to an inquiry, but Trump seems to be referring to a set of annual statistics released by the FBI. The most recent report came out in September.

Those statistics showed that the number of murders and non-negligent homicides rose nationally between 2014 and 2015 by 10.8 percent. When we checked the numbers, we confirmed that this increase does rank as the biggest year-to-year jump in murders since 1970-71, when the number rose by 11.1 percent. That was exactly 45 years ago.

In fact, Trump’s debate comment was stated more accurately than what one of his key surrogates -- former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- said earlier in the day on Meet the Press. Giuliani stated that "last year, crime went up more than in the last 41 years."

Not only did Giuliani get the number of years wrong, but he also referred to "crime" generally, not to murders specifically. And that makes a difference. Violent crime did go up between 2014 and 2015, but by a significantly smaller percentage than murders did -- 3.9 percent. That rate of increase was smaller than several year-to-year increases since 1971, most recently an increase between 1989 and 1990 of 10.6 percent. In addition, between 2014 and 2015, property crime actually dropped by 2.6 percent.

So Trump has a fair point. Still, we’ll note two caveats.

First, his terminology was imperfect. The 10.8 percent increase represents an overall national figure -- not the figure for murders "within our cities," as Trump phrased it. That said, murder rates within cities tend to be higher than for the country at large, as this chart shows. (The red line is the rate for cities over 250,000 population, while the blue line is the rate for the country as a whole.) So this flaw in Trump’s phrasing doesn’t strike us as especially problematic.