Lying About Crime

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 23, 2025

First, you spend years and years denigrating and devaluing institutions on which people rely. You call the data they produce “fake news” or a “hoax” or a “scam.” When the numbers and reports do not emerge exactly the way you want, you fire whoever is reporting them. Then you just make up your own data.

We’ve seen this most recently with crime statistics, illegal immigration, and jobs numbers, plus a revisit to the old lies surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

Crime, we are told, is out of control in Washington, D.C., and you are constantly at risk of being mugged, carjacked, robbed, raped, or shot anytime anybody ventures out. It’s so bad that Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, says he doesn’t even use a seat belt anymore so he won’t be trapped in his vehicle during a carjacking. Never mind that the crime rates in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City are higher than that of Washington, D.C.

In fact, the crime wave Trump ranted about and used to justify sending in federal troops was a delusion—the crime rate in the nation’s capital is actually the lowest its been in 30 years, with homicides, robberies, carjacking, and rape down from last year and years past. And those figures are from Trump’s own Department of Justice (DOJ), which also reports crime is down nationally.

The crime lie was likely nothing more than an attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein ugliness. Washington, D.C. isn’t even in the top 10 for per capita crime rate and ranks behind St. Louis, Memphis, Birmingham, Detroit, and Baltimore for violent crimes. According to those same DOJ numbers, Memphis is the most dangerous major city in America.

Interestingly, of the 30 largest cities in the country, El Paso, Texas, is the safest. Isn’t that a border city that’s supposed to be awash in illegal immigrant criminals?

The lies about illegal immigrants started way back in 2015 when Donald Trump first descended his golden escalator and went on his diatribe about the bad people Mexico was sending. Much to the surprise of most of us, Trump claimed Mexico and other countries were emptying their jails and sending us rapists, murderers, terrorists, and violent mental patients.

That was the primary justification for the development of essentially a national police force tasked with finding and deporting all those violent criminals that were sent here. We were told repeatedly by Trump and others in his administration that the focus would be on illegal immigrants who committed crimes while in the U.S.

There is widespread support from the far left and the far right and the political ideologies in between for the removal of criminal illegals; come here illegally and then commit crimes, and we’d all like you gone. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s working out.

And never mind that according to DOJ and Census data, legal and illegal immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

According to the Deportation Data Project, an arm of Trump’s own Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fully 75 percent of those we’ve deported in 2025 have no criminal convictions elsewhere and none here other than their illegal entry into the country. After all the claims and promises and publicity, a scant 12 percent of those being deported have committed crimes classified as violent or potentially violent.

Among those deported have been at least a dozen children who are American citizens but whose parents were deported. In one infamous case, a four-year-old American boy with leukemia in the midst of treatment was shipped off to Honduras with his mother.

(A word, if we may, about the masked law enforcement folks doing the Home Depot stakeouts and making arrests; the claim is the work is so dangerous they must keep their identity secret. What utter nonsense. Our city police, sheriff deputies, and state police arrest dangerous people every day, some of whom have even more dangerous friends, testify openly in court against those dangerous folks, and never once feel obliged to wear a mask. Those masked law enforcement officers look like third-world thugs afraid not of danger but of being held accountable.)

When he can, Trump simply fires anyone reporting information he doesn’t like. Dr. Erika McEntarfer, former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, discovered this unfortunate fact when she revised job growth numbers for the last three months downward. Trump didn’t like that, called this long-time government employee who has worked for multiple administrations of both parties a “Biden hack,” and fired her. One assumes the next commissioner will be expected to report Trump-approved numbers.

Next on Trump’s hit list? Voting machines and mail-in voting. He was told both methods of voting generate fraud and rigged the 2020 election—never mind that no widespread fraud was ever found despite exhaustive investigation. Trump’s advisor on the subject? Vladimir Putin.