FACT FOCUS: A look at false claims made by Trump in California

In a press conference from his Los Angeles-area golf club, former President Donald Trump revisited several topics from Tuesday night’s debate, repeating several false and misleading claims on issues including crime, the economy and immigration.

Here’s are the facts:

Trump again falsely claims crime skyrocketed under the Biden administration

CLAIM: New numbers show that crime has skyrocketed under the Biden administration.

THE FACTS: Violent crime surged during the pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year — the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records.

But FBI data released in June shows that the overall violent crime rate declined 15% in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. One expert has cautioned, however, that those figures are preliminary and may overstate the actual reduction in crime.

On Friday, Trump cited numbers he said were from the “bureau of justice statistics” to claim crime was up. This appears to be a reference to the National Crime Victimization Survey recently released by the Justice Department, which shows that the number of times people were victims of violent crime increased by about 40% from 2020 to 2023. The report notes, however, that while the rate of violent victimizations in 2023 was higher than it was in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate in 2019, when Trump was president.

That survey aims to capture both crimes reported to police and crimes that are not reported to police and is conducted annually through interviews with about 150,000 households. It doesn’t include murders or crimes against people under the age of 12.