Moderator of an ABC News debate claimed, based on incomplete data, that crime had decreased

The exchange occurred in response to a question about immigration, to which Trump responded by mentioning crimes committed by immigrants living illegally in the United States.

“All over the world, crime is down, everywhere in the world, except here. Here, despite their fraudulent claims, crime is skyrocketing,” Trump said. “Crime in this country is skyrocketing, and we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime, and it's reaching levels that nobody thought possible.”

Muir, an ABC News anchor, interjected, pointing to an FBI report this year that said violent crime nationwide fell 15% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the previous year.

“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says that violent crime overall in this country is actually going down,” Muir said.

Trump responded that the FBI statistics did not include the cities with the “worst crime.”

“Excuse me, the FBI – they falsified the data,” Trump said. “They didn't include the worst cities. They didn't include the worst crime cities. It was fraud.”

Trump's remark was partly true. The FBI changed the way it collected national crime data in 2021, temporarily upending its Uniform Crime Report program, through which it publishes quarterly statistics on crime in the United States.

This initially resulted in some large US police departments, including those in New York City and Los Angeles, not implementing the FBI's changed method. This meant that urban areas where crime is higher were left out of the statistics.

The FBI's data for the first quarter of this year is still preliminary, and while many major cities are now included in that data, some are not. Los Angeles, where violent crime increased in the first quarter of 2024, is among the jurisdictions still missing.

A note on the FBI's reporting dashboard states that the first quarter of this year's data “is based on data from 13,719 of the nation's 19,268 law enforcement agencies,” meaning more than a quarter of law enforcement agencies are missing from the data.

Zack Smith, a senior legal scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said crime statistics at the national and even state level cannot provide a complete picture because “crime is such a hyperlocal phenomenon.”

Debates about crime statistics can also become “skewed” because so many variables play a role in data collection, he said.

“[The FBI] has made it much more difficult and time-consuming for local police departments to report their statistics to the FBI,” Smith told the Washington Examiner.

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He added that “many jurisdictions, including some of the largest jurisdictions, have either not reported or have reported significantly late.”

Smith also noted that even if violent crime declined this year, “it would still be significantly higher than it was four to five years ago.”