Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, circulated a baseless rumor on social media that the residents of Springfield, Ohio, “have had their pets abducted and eaten by” immigrants. Now, Vance has cherry-picked data to make the unfounded claim that immigrants are responsible for an 81% increase in the city’s murders.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a “field hearing” in Manhattan on April 17 to draw attention to “how Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s pro-crime, anti-victim policies have led to an increase in violent crime.” Experts told us it was unlikely Bragg had or could have an impact on crime trends, and crime data for Manhattan don’t match the GOP narrative.
A Republican super PAC’s ad labels Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman “dangerously liberal on crime,” citing a case in which Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, voted to recommend the commutation of a life sentence for a man convicted of murder in 1970. We thought readers may want to know more of the context of the case.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani misleadingly contrasted his mayoral record on crime with a recent spike in murders under Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, citing the uptick as evidence that Democratic mayors are “a danger to their people.”
President Donald Trump claimed that federal immigration officials asked the Los Angeles Police Department in January to detain an “illegal immigrant,” but the police “let him go, and he killed somebody.” That’s not how it happened.
Donald Trump said that the murder rate in the U.S. is the “highest it’s been in 45 years” and “the press never talks about it.” The press doesn’t talk about it because Trump’s claim is wildly inaccurate.
Trump retweeted a bogus graphic purporting to show the percentage of whites killed by blacks and other homicide data delineated by race. Almost every figure in the graphic is wrong.
On CNN’s "State of the Union with Candy Crowley," Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah perpetuated a falsehood about gun ownership and lower murder rates.
Lee: And to the contrary, I think there is abundant research suggesting that in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate actually goes down.
That’s not true. A causal relationship between prevalence of gun ownership and crime hasn’t been established by researchers. We looked into this subject in 2008 and found that the statistical relationship is the opposite of what Lee said for murder,