Here’s a Closer Look at President Trump’s Big Lie About El Paso

At last night’s State of the Union address, President Trump said this:

The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our Nation’s most dangerous cities. Now, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of our safest cities.

This is yet another great example of how to lie by cherry picking statistics. Here is the violent crime rate reported by the El Paso Police Department:

Trump was right! Crime was rising, and when they built the wall it suddenly began to plummet. Build that wall!

But wait. Let’s finish up the chart, shall we? Here is violent crime in El Paso since 1993:

With this broader view it’s easy to see that Trump was lying. As with all big cities, crime in El Paso dropped steadily for more than a decade from its peak in 1993. From 2006-08 it had a brief and minor rise—most likely just noise—and then stayed basically flat after that. Plainly the wall had next to no effect.

However, if you carefully pick your starting date at 2006 and then zoom in, you can make it look like the wall had a massive effect. That’s what Team Trump did. And to drive home what an outright lie this was, here’s a chart of the crime rate in every mid-size city in the United States tracked by the FBI:

El Paso has never had “one of the highest” crime rates in the country. In fact, it’s had the lowest crime rate in the country since 2005, and it’s been among the four lowest since 1991. There’s simply no excuse for pretending that El Paso was ever a high-crime city or that it took the construction of a wall to bring down its crime rate. It’s just flatly not true.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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