The New York Times fact-checked a statement from President Donald Trump Saturday about murder rates in Baltimore and Detroit and said that the president’s claim was ‘misleading’ because he compared crime rates of cities to those of entire countries.
Trump said that the murder rates in Baltimore and Detroit are higher than those in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Afghanistan, according to the report. The Times labeled the claim as false but said that the president was correct about Guatemala and Afghanistan.
The article was written to fact-check the president’s claims during his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his first since the pandemic began. The authors wrote that “President Trump made multiple statements that were false, misleading or lacked evidence.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ‘A Much Dirtier Game’ — Trump Wants To ‘Get Involved’ In Making Advertiser Boycotts Illegal)
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“Baltimore and Detroit do have higher murder rates than Guatemala and Afghanistan, but El Salvador’s rate is higher,” the report said. “Regardless, comparing the crime rates of cities to that of entire countries is misleading.”
Baltimore’s homicide rate was 55.8 per 100,000 people and Detroit’s rate was 39.8, the article said. Both cities had a higher murder rate than Guatemala and Afghanistan, which were 26.1 and 7.1, respectively. El Salvador’s homicide rate was the highest, at 61.8, according to the Times. All data is from 2017, which the authors said is the most recent data that was available for all areas.
More recent numbers, however, appear to support the president’s claim about El Salvador. According to the 2020 Crime and Safety Report from the Regional Security Office at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, the homicide rate in El Salvador in 2019 was 36 per 100,000 people. Detroit’s homicide rate was 40.6 in 2019, according to The Detroit News, and The Baltimore Sun said that the city’s 2019 homicide rate was greater than 57 per 100,000 people.
The New York Times, along with several other outlets including CNN, NBC News, and The Guardian, reported that teenagers on Tik Tok were trolling the rally by registering for free tickets and then not showing up to make the stadium appear empty. President Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale denied the reports, saying that the Trump team weeds out fake ticket holders and that the media “behaved unprofessionally and were willing dupes to the charade,” according to Politico.