Here is the number that got shouted from a hundred stages. Forty-three percent. That is how much violent crime supposedly jumped since Donald Trump left office, the way he put it at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, in August 2024: "There's been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office." [3] It is clean, it is scary, and it is specific. It is also doing work the evidence will not back up. I pulled the file.

Give the man his strongest case first, because that is the honest way to do this. The 43 percent is not invented. It comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a federal survey that asks Americans directly whether they were victims of crime, including the crimes they never reported to police. [5] From 2020 to 2022, that survey did record a sharp rise in violent victimization. Stop the clock at the end of 2022, and the number is real.

Here is what the number leaves out. The survey window ends in 2022. The story did not. The FBI's annual crime report, built from more than sixteen thousand police agencies covering almost ninety-six percent of the country, shows violent crime falling, not climbing. [1] It dropped in 2023. It dropped again in 2024, down 4.5 percent, with murder down 14.9 percent. [1] Then the 2025 figures came in, and they were not close.

VIOLENT CRIME, YEAR OVER YEAR

  • 2024: down 4.5% - murder down 14.9%
  • 2025: down 9.3% - murder down 18.1%

FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, 2024 and 2025 data releases [1][2]

Read the 2025 release closely, because this is the part that tells you what the 43 percent was ever for. The agency now reports the steepest one-year fall in violent crime and murder in its modern records. The FBI's own director called it "the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937." [2] Same agency. Same data system. The decline started a full three years before this administration arrived, and it ran straight through the campaign that called the country a war zone.

WHO GAINED

  • A frightened country moves votes. A safe one does not.
  • The "carnage" story ran for years while the line on the chart went down.
  • When the falling number turned useful, the same people claimed the credit.

I will say the part a straight shooter has to say. A national number is not your block. Some cities still carry real violence, and a falling rate is cold comfort to a family that lost someone this week. A drop is a direction, not a destination. None of that rescues the claim. He told the debate stage that crime here was "up and through the roof." [4] That is a statement about right now, and right now the number is going down.

Here is the after-action report, plain. The 43 percent is a real figure doing fake work: one survey, one window, propping up a story that three straight years of data take apart. That makes the claim mostly false. It makes the people still repeating it something worse than mistaken, because the file is open on the table and they are reading you the wrong page on purpose. You do not have to feel any particular way about crime to want the truth about it. The numbers are public. Check them yourself.

THE BOTTOM LINE

  • The 43% is real, from one survey, one window (2020 to 2022)
  • Every measure since shows violent crime falling: 2023, 2024, 2025
  • The claim that crime is "through the roof" today: Mostly False