From the Tuesday Morning Jolt…

Fact-Checking Donald Trump, Poorly
One of the lead items on the local Washington D.C. television news last night was District of Columbia officials raising heck over the White House web site featuring outdated statistics for the local homicide rate.
Here’s PolitiFact, declaring Donald Trump and the White House web site “mostly false” for declaring, “In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent.”
In 2014, there were 105 homicides in D.C. The following year — 2015 — there were 162. That’s an increase of 54 percent — and that’s in line with what the White House website said.
But the story doesn’t end there. There is already city-level data for homicides in 2016, and the release of that data painted a different picture.
The figure for 2016 was 135 homicides. That’s down 17 percent from the previous year — not up roughly 50 percent.
Yeah… but 2016’s total is still 30 homicides higher than 2014. D.C. had a slight decline after a spike the previous year. So far, it doesn’t look like the 2015 spike was a one-year blip. From 2011 to 2014, the number of homicides ranged from 88 to 108. As the Brennan Center for Justice put it at the end of last year, the murder rate in D.C. “remains relatively high compared to recent history.”
So yes, Trump and the White House would have been wiser and more accurate to say, “In our nation’s capital, killings are on the rise.” But we can arrange the statistics another way, and measure biennially instead of annually: 2013 and 2014, 209 people were killed in the District. In the next two years, 297 people were killed. Any way you slice it, I think everyone would agree the number of homicides in the District is too damn high.
Keep in mind the context of the White House statement:
In the section titled, “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community,” it says in part, “The Trump Administration is committed to reducing violent crime. In 2015, homicides increased by 17 percent in America’s 50 largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. There were thousands of shootings in Chicago last year alone.”
The gist is pretty clear: violent crime is too high, and the Trump administration is determined to bring it down.
Like the homicide rate, the overall violent crime rate in the District of Columbia declined slightly in 2016, but probably not enough to reassure residents. Cases of sex abuse remained the same, assault with a deadly weapon was down six percent, and total violent crime was down ten percent. But the long-term statistics aren’t quite so pretty. In 2011, 95 percent of the city’s homicides were “cleared” or solved. By 2015, that was down to 61 percent.
If I were local officials, I’d be more worried about the homicide clearance rate than outdated statistics on the White House web site.