Just days ago, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders repeated a claim from a highly dubious Washington Post study, that “in 2016, counties hosting a Trump rally saw a 226% spike in hate crimes.” Ilhan Omar has repeated the claim, as have the NAACP, MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Joe Scarborough, among many others.
Politifact gave a generous ruling to the claim in grading it “half-true” because of some caveats they found in the study, such as the fact that “the data can be subject to ‘statistical noise’ [unexplained variability] and jurisdictional differences in hate crime definitions and police aggressiveness, and that cause and effect are hard to pinpoint.”
A bigger problem isn’t that the definitions of hate crimes differ from jurisdictions, its that the Post doesn’t use a database of hate crimes at all in their study. In fact, that Politifact even thought jurisdictional issues would be relevant here calls into question how heavily they scrutinized the study. As the popular Facebook fact checker “Meme Policeman” noticed when he began diving into the numbers, the list of hate crimes that the Post used in their analysis wasn’t a list of hate crimes as traditionally recorded:
Their definition of hate crimes included anti-Semitic comments made on Snapchat, and trash talk between 13-year olds at a soccer game. While acts of bigotry, the ADL’s definition of hate crimes is far more liberal than the FBI’s (which includes physical assault, threats, harassment, and vandalism). As I pointed out in a prior article regarding the ADL’s statistical looseness, the ADL had previously made headlines with a study claiming that anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 57% in 2017. The entire rise was attributable to a single individual who was phoning in bomb threats to Synagogues. Without him, anti-Semitic violence actually had decreased by 47% according to the ADL’s own statistics. That’s an enormous amount of variability.
Furthermore, Sanders tried to give the impression that counties which held Trump rallies then saw 226% explosions in hate crimes, but the Post didn’t actually do a “before and after” comparison in their study. Rather, they compared counties that held Trump rallies with “comparable” counties, without ever telling us what a comparable county is. A county of the same size that never held a Trump rally? A county with the same income demographics? The same racial demographics? We’re not told.
Luckily, the Meme Policeman actually did an exhaustive analysis of the FBI’s statistics, and it contradicts the Posts findings:
There were 1,433 hate crimes in all cities and counties that Trump had campaign rallies in during 2015, and that increased 1% to 1,450 in 2016. Population in those cities and counties rose more than 1%, representing a decline in hate crimes committed per-capita.
Or to put this in other terms, hate crimes increased 4.6% in 2016 but only 1% in areas where Trump held rallies.