President Donald Trump keeps saying that murder is on the rise in America — but law enforcement statistics collected by the government say otherwise.



At a listening session with county sheriffs on Tuesday morning, Trump said that the murder rate in the US is at its highest in “45 to 47 years.”

But according to the most recent complete data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting, the US murder rate was 5.0 homicides per 100,000 in 2015. These are not peak numbers.

According to a 2008 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which uses the FBI’s UCR data, in 1980 the murder rate peaked at 10.2 per 100,000. This high rate declined then rose again in the late 1980s and early 1990s to another peak in 1991 of 9.8 per 100,000. The total number of homicides reached an all-time high of 24,703 homicides in 1991, according to the FBI data.

BuzzFeed News reached out to the White House to ask where Trump is getting his homicide numbers from, but didn’t immediately hear back.

During a interview with CNN on Tuesday afternoon, White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told host Jake Tapper that she believes Trump "is relying on data, perhaps, from a particular area. I'm not sure who gave him that data."

One possibility is that Trump is citing numbers from a 2015 report that showed a one-year spike in murders of 11% from 2014 to 2015 — the highest one-year spike since 1971.

However, the same 2015 report also illustrates that this spike is not an accurate depiction of the country at large.

According to the FBI report, the 11% spike was largely driven by seven cities that saw sharp increases in murders from 2014 to 2015: Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Washington, DC.

Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox says that Trump is “dead wrong” and “misunderstanding the situation.”



Fox notes that one reason for the one-year spike in the homicide rate in 2015 is that the number had reached such a low in 2014. According to the FBI’s UCR, in 2014 there were 4.5 murders per 100,000 people nationwide. “It wouldn’t be such a huge jump if the base number wasn’t so low,” Fox says.

“Basically, we’re a victim of our own success,” Fox said. “If we had not brought our homicide rate down by half in 25 years we wouldn’t be saying this jump was so remarkable. For example, say you’re 300 pounds, you go on a diet and you lose 200 pounds, then you put on 10. It doesn’t mean you’re back where you were.”