President Donald Trump on Tuesday again singled out violence in Chicago, this time during a White House meeting with sheriffs where he repeated a debunked claim that the U.S. murder rate is the highest it's been in 45 years.

"If you ran Chicago, you would solve that nightmare, I'll tell you," Trump told visiting sheriffs. "I'll bet everybody in the room ... would raise their hand, because to allow, I mean literally hundreds of shootings a month, it's worse than some of the places that we read about in the Middle East where you have wars going on.

"It's so sad," Trump said. "Chicago's become so sad a situation."

It was the fourth time in less than three weeks in office that Trump has called out Chicago for its violence.

His latest denunciation drew a rebuke from City Hall.

"Instead of focusing so much energy on rhetoric about Chicago, the people of this city would be better off if the president would finally partner with us to improve public safety for Chicago," Matt McGrath, a spokesman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said in a statement.

Trump, appearing with Vice President Mike Pence, Acting Attorney General Dana Boente and other officials, launched into his remarks about Chicago on Tuesday after asking the sheriffs if they had ever had a White House meeting. Some responded, "No, sir."

"And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in 47 years, right?" the president said. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that — I'd say that in a speech and everybody was surprised. Because the press doesn't tell it like it is. It wasn't to their advantage to say that.

"But the murder rate is the highest it's been in, I guess, from 45 to 47 years."

The most recent annual FBI statistics available show the national rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in 2015 was 4.9 per 100,000 people. That was lower than every year between 1996 and 2009, when the rate fell from 7.4 killings per 100,000 people to five for the same population.

The country's worst year for homicides in the modern era was either 1980, when the homicide rate hit its peak at 10.2 killings for every 100,000 people, with 23,040 homicides — or in 1991, when a record 24,703 people were killed, according to FBI statistics cited by the Los Angeles Times. The homicide rate in 1991 was 9.8 deaths per 100,000 people, FBI statistics show.

After years of decline, homicides in Chicago have been on the rise and exceeded 760 last year, the worst in two decades. Violence remained stubbornly high in January as homicides and shootings kept at about the same levels as a year earlier.

The president stirred much speculation in a tweet Jan. 24 about Chicago's violent January, saying that if the city didn't fix the "horrible carnage" going on, "I will send in the Feds!"

Then in a nationally televised interview, Trump said two people were shot and killed during then-President Barack Obama's farewell speech Jan. 10 in Chicago. The Tribune subsequently reported that police records showed no one was fatally shot in Chicago for about 24 hours before or after the speech.

Last week, Trump responded enthusiastically to a visiting Cleveland-area minister's surprise comment that "top gang thugs" wanted to meet in Chicago to help reduce the city's gun violence.

"That's a great idea because Chicago is totally out of control," the president told the Rev. Darrell Scott at a Black History Month event at the White House.

kskiba@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @KatherineSkiba