Fact check: There were more murders in Springfield under Trump than under Biden-Harris

Washington
CNN
—

Senator JD Vance, facing intense criticism for spreading false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and eating other residents' pets, has attempted to make a U-turn by blaming Vice President Kamala Harris and the influx of Haitians during her term for a number of broader social problems in the city.

Some of these problems are well known, such as the strain on local health care systems. But Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, added a surprising claim in a CNN interview on Sunday: Harris and the influx of immigrants have caused a sharp rise in the murder rate.

“I talk to my constituents and I hear terrible things about what's going on in Springfield, and Kamala Harris' open borders policy has caused these problems,” Vance said. A moment later, he said, “The murder rate has gone up 81% because Kamala Harris allowed something to happen to this small community.”

We have investigated this claim and concluded that it is a good example of how statistics can be deliberately selected and misleadingly presented to serve unsubstantiated narratives.

“In my 21 years as a district attorney, there has not been a single murder involving the Haitian community – either as victims or as perpetrators of those murders,” said Daniel Driscoll, the Republican chief prosecutor in Clark County, whose largest city is Springfield, in an interview Friday.

Although Vance cited real data, he did not mention what the numbers were.
Spokesman William Martin said Vance was referring to official Ohio figures that show there were five murders in Springfield in 2021 and nine in 2023.

That increase of four murders is actually an 80% increase. But an increase from five murders one year to nine murders two years later does not prove Vance's claim that Harris and immigrants caused a murder spike—or even that there is a current murder spike.

In small communities, Driscoll said, “one year there's one murder and the next year there's two murders, then suddenly the rate has gone up 100%, but that's not a significant difference in the number of murders.” He looks at “trends,” he said – and “we haven't seen any trend that suggests the number of murders in Clark County is going up.”

Here are five major problems with Vance’s narrative:

Vance said Springfield's murder rate has skyrocketed “because of” Harris' policies. But a quick look at Springfield's murder numbers for the president's last three terms — readily available online from the FBI and the State of Ohio — immediately calls his claim into question.

The second term of President Barack Obama: 30 murders. Six in 2013; seven in 2014; twelve in 2015; five in 2016.

Trump's term in office: 33 murders. Nine in 2017 (he succeeded Obama on January 20 of that year); 13 in 2018; three in 2019; eight in 2020.

3.5 years in office of President Joe Biden: 22 murdersFive in 2021 (he succeeded Trump on January 20 of that year); six in 2022; nine in 2023; two in the first half of 2024.

Even if you exclude the data for the first half of 2024 and compare only the three completed years of the Biden-Harris administration with the first three or last three years of the Trump administration, there were still fewer murders under Biden-Harris.

Vance did not mention that the same official Ohio data he cited for 2021-2023 shows that there were only two murders in Springfield from January-June 2024, the most recent period for which official data is available. Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, told CNN that his own tracking shows that there were still two murders in Springfield through July — a 60% drop, Asher said, from five murders by the same time last year.

It's possible that the rest of 2024 will be even worse. But it's also possible that the full-year 2024 number will be below 2021's or only slightly above 2021's, rendering Vance's 80% increase obsolete. At the very least, the early 2024 number should caution against taking the 2023 number as evidence of a continued uptrend.

As we've noted repeatedly in crime fact-checking, it's notoriously difficult to identify concrete reasons for the increase or decrease in crime in particular cities in any given year. And no one has proven that Haitian immigrants in particular, or immigrants in general, were responsible for the four additional murders in 2023 compared to 2021. (A prominent local case from 2023, in which a Haitian immigrant committed aggravated manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally plowed his minivan into a school bus, killing a child, is not classified as a murder, and the child's father has explicitly said it was not murder.)

Local and state authorities certainly have not blamed the rise in murder rates on immigrants. Driscoll called it “luck or the lack thereof.” And Andy Wilson, who now serves as Ohio's safety director under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and was Clark County prosecutor before Driscoll, told reporters this week that the most important safety issue regarding Haitian immigrants in the state is safe driving, “not crime” and “not violence.”

It is not clear whether it any Vance cited a particular social, political or economic reason for the increase from 2021 to 2023. When the absolute number of murders is as low as it is in Springfield, a tiny number of random events – a dispute resolved or unresolved, a bullet fired slightly left or right, an unusually slow or fast ambulance response – can cause impressive-sounding percentage changes in the annual numbers.

Driscoll said he has seen people survive with gunshot wounds to the head and people die with gunshot wounds to the arm. “The difference between a gunshot victim and a murder victim is sometimes millimeters,” he said.

Springfield's murder numbers have fluctuated in a narrow range for a decade, from a low of three murders to a high of 13 murders—and the high of 13 and the low of three murders were recorded under Trump in 2018 and 2019. It would be foolish to blame Trump for the high (which was up 44% from the previous year) or to attribute the low (which was down 77% from the previous year) to him, because these numbers fluctuate for reasons that even local police say are difficult to determine.

“Given that homicides are rare, there is a lot of variation from year to year that is best explained as chance, especially when the total number of homicides is small,” Asher said in an email. “There is a lot of random variation that contributes to whether a shooting victim dies, and sometimes one year there are more shootings but fewer deaths, while the opposite is true the following year.”

Vance bolstered his argument against Harris by comparing 2023, when there were nine murders in Springfield, to 2021, when there were five murders. But since more than 11 months of 2021 fell under the Biden-Harris administration, it would probably make more sense to compare 2023 with 2020the last full calendar year under Trump if one at least attempts to assess the impact of Biden-Harris' policies.

A comparison between 2023 and 2020 would show an increase of 13%, from eight murders in 2020 to nine murders in 2023. Again, this is probably just random fluctuations – but it's not 80%.