evidence: President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that "our crime statistics are at a level that they haven’t been at," calling the numbers "record setting." The U.S. murder rate was lower in 2014, and the violent crime rate overall has been lower in several past years, with the lowest levels decades ago, according to FBI data. [...] As a candidate in 2016, Trump repeatedly made the bogus claim that the murder rate in the U.S. was the "highest it’s been in 45 years." The rate in 2015 actually was lower than any other time between 1965 and 2009. He also hyped a year-over-year increase in some cities, claiming, "violent crime has increased in cities across America." But crime had been declining over the long term, and experts caution against discerning a pattern from a few years of data. [...] The most recent FBI statistics on the rate and number of crimes are for 2018. They show that crime has declined since Trump became president, but the statistics aren’t "at a level that they haven’t been at." And historically, these figures have been generally declining for years.