Even as Donald Trump's surrogates are re-tweeting photoshopped images of Hillary Clinton in blackface, Trump himself is trying to win the black vote by simply asking black Americans "What the hell do you have to lose?!"
And in response to the news that NBA star Dwyane Wade's cousin had been shot in Chicago, he sent out two tweets talking about how bad the crime rate is getting.
The first one
declared "Look how bad it is getting! How much more crime, how many more shootings, will it take for African-Americans and Latinos to vote Trump=SAFE!"
And less than ten minutes later, he
followed up with "Inner-city crime is reaching record levels. African-Americans will vote for Trump because they know I will stop the slaughter going on!".
Last week, Trump vaguely
explained to Bill O'Reilly how he would do that, "by getting very much tougher".
But the truth is, Trump couldn't be more wrong about
violent crime in America, because it's not at an all-time high, and it's actually nearly half of what it was when George H.W. Bush left office in 1993.
In 1993, the first year that Bill Clinton took office, the FBI reports just under 2 million violent crimes, and over 24,000 murders.
Over 20 years later in 2014, the FBI reported slightly under 1.2 million violent crimes, and only about 14,000 murders, meaning that the crime rate had been nearly cut in half!
In fact, this
graph shows that violent crime clearly decreased during the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations, but it sharply increased during the Republican Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations.
So Trump is wrong on at least two counts: violent crimes and homicides in America have been cut nearly in half over the last 25 years, and they've never fallen faster than during Bill Clinton's time in office.
But that's not stopping Trump from using Chicago as his leading example of how inner-city crime is on the rise nationally.
And he can do that because, as
this graph shows, even though there's been an absolute decrease in violent crimes in Chicago over the last 25 years, the homicide rate in Chicago has been on the rise since 2014.
But it's really hard to imagine how Chicago could get tougher on crime anyway.
The
Guardian reported last year how Chicago's police department already runs what is essentially its own CIA black-site at "Homan Square", where police unconstitutionally detain, interrogate, and torture suspects or witnesses before ever officially booking the person with a crime.
It basically treats everyone who is not a Chicago Police Officer as though they are an enemy combatant who is not protected under the U.S. Constitution, and it's hard to get much "tougher" than treating civilians like enemy combatants.
And in all likelihood, taking a "tougher" approach to crime would probably lead to even more crime!.
