evidence: "Trump’s implication that the crime rate is only going up is false," said Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University. "During 2020, the last year of the Trump presidency, violent crime rose dramatically. The murder rate, for example, increased by almost 30%, the largest one-year increase on record. But violent crime has been falling during the Biden presidency." [...] Still, given the declines in 2023 in national numbers on everything from murder to rape to aggravated assault to robbery to arson, there is no basis for Trump’s claim that US crime statistics are only going up. In fact, Asher told CNN, the available data suggests that the national rates of murder and overall violent crime were lower in 2023 than they were under Trump in 2020, when the country experienced social and economic upheaval on account of the Covid-19 pandemic.