Courtesy of the NAACP, with over 37,000 likes and 23,000 retweets. But this meme isn’t limited to them, it originates with a Washington Post article, based on research by political science professors at the University of North Texas. From there, it got picked up by countless media outlets, including The Hill, Business Insider, Vox and SF Gate. The amount of shares on social media are too numerous to count, but include major and influential voices like Joy Reid, Arianna Huffington, Will Bunch and Joe Scarborough, who repeated this claim as fact. Did hate crimes really rise 226% where Trump held his rallies? Let’s examine the evidence.

The Flawed Washington Post Study

Since this statistic originates with the Washington Post article, let’s look at their methodology. The professors examined the counties which hosted 275 Trump campaign rallies in 2016 and used the Anti-Defamation League’s “HEAT map” to compile data about hate crimes in the subsequent months. They found that hate crimes rose 226% in relation to “comparable counties” that did not host a rally. However, there are serious flaws with this study.

The ADL’s HEAT map is not a good source to analyze hate crimes, because it’s not a list of hate crimes. It includes a list of “extremist and anti-Semitic incidents,” which are often not crimes at all. If you download their data (click on “download selected data”) you can see all the events they include. A great many are simply examples of free speech and/or rude and offensive behavior. Here are some examples:

They list literally hundreds of instances where (generally far right) activist groups distributed fliers or other propaganda material. Some of these had slogans which were fairly benign (“America First,” “Defend America,” “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Victory,” “Better dead than red”) while others were outright racist or anti-Semitic (“Join the KKK and fight for race and nation,” “European roots, American greatness”).

Approximately two dozen League of the South members held a flash demonstration on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

A juvenile received images of Hitler to her cell phone from an unknown number.

Anti-Semitic comments made in a Snapchat group.

In a soccer game, a 13 year old was told “stop following me Jew” by another player.

During a sermon, a priest made anti-Semitic comments about Jewish liturgy.

However offensive one might find these events, they are not hate crimes. So long as groups and individuals are just distributing material, protesting or being jerks they are within their first amendment rights. Hate crimes involve credible threats or damage to persons or property, and include acts like vandalism, intimidation, burglary and assault. While the ADL’s list includes these acts, they also include many things that don’t qualify as crimes, just read through the list yourself. More than half appear to be examples of offensive speech, not crimes.

The purpose of the ADL map is to identify what they feel are disturbing racist or anti-Semitic acts, but this is not at all the same as identifying hate crimes. For that, the FBI data on hate crimes should be used, yet it wasn’t used in the study. Thus, the study cited in the Washington Post is based on flawed data for its stated purpose.

The study also says they compared counties with Trump rallies to “comparable counties”. They don’t explain how they do this, but it’s very suspect. For example, what is a comparable city/county to Las Vegas/Clark County? Vegas is by far the largest city in Nevada, and there’s no city of equivalent population for hundreds of miles. What ever is chosen will certainly not be “comparable” by any reasonable standard. Trump tended to have rallies in urban areas, which one would assume would have higher instances of these acts than the “comparable counties” around them. A far better method would be to compare the same city/county before and after a Trump rally, a method which will be done here.

In order for a study on hate crimes to be taken seriously, it must use the FBI Hate Crime database, or an equivalent (which doesn’t yet exist). The Washington Post article does not use such data, and I could find no other source which attempted to check Trump rallies with such data. Which meant I had to do my own study.

The Meme Policeman Methodology

For this analysis, I took the list of Trump’s presidential campaign rallies. These began in 2015, but only the ones during 2016 up until the election were used, as that’s what the meme references.

There were 275 total rallies, but some cities were visited multiple times, giving us 223 total cities/counties to analyze.

The hate crimes data was taken from the FBI database from 2015 and 2016 in order to compare hate crimes for each year for every area. If you click on Table 13, it breaks down each state’s reported hate crimes by the local reporting agency. If the thesis of the meme is correct, the rhetoric of the Trump rallies would register a noticeable uptick in the amount of hate crimes in these areas during 2016 compared to 2015.

FBI hate crimes statistics come from various participating law enforcement agencies around the country who provide them with data. Generally, it’s cities providing the data, although some states also have counties listed, and occasionally other agencies like universities, parks, highway patrol or airports will also report. Thus, it’s often a bit complicated to find data for a particular campaign rally’s area as there could be multiple reporting agencies.

For each rally, I included data for the city, county and any other relevant reporting agency nearby. Sometimes this was simple, as in New Hampshire, where only cities are listed. Other areas were more complex. For example, for Trump’s rally in Miami I included data from Miami Beach, North Miami, North Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County.

In some cases, Trump had two rallies in nearby towns or cities in the same county. For those, I only included the county once, as to avoid double counting.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it was! There was no way to automate the process, as each rally location had to be researched for county and possible universities, airports and parks. For more info on how to find and sift through FBI hate crime data like a ninja, see my instructional video.

Results

Of the 223 cities and towns Trump had rallies in, over 1/3 (86) reported zero hate crimes for all of 2016. Over half (127) reported one or less. Considering the relatively low frequency of these crimes, statistics for a given area can be wildly misleading. For instance, Tampa, which Trump visited more than any other city, had hate crimes rise by a whopping 300%! But this is because it went from 1 incident in 2015 to 4 in 2016. Meanwhile, hate crimes in Las Vegas, where Trump visited 4 times, plummeted by 40% (48 in 2015 to 29 in 2016). Thus, beware anytime you see hate crimes stats for a local area or even state, as these can fluctuate dramatically. The amount of Trump rallies evens out these fluctuations a bit, but it should still be taken with skepticism.

Here are the combined results for all the cities and counties Trump had campaign rallies for in 2016:

2016: 1,450 hate crimes

2015: 1,433 hate crimes

Far from the meme’s and Washington Post’s claim, the increase in hate crimes in cities/counties where Trump had rallies was just 1%. Furthermore, it could be credibly argued that hate crimes actually declined in these areas when factoring increased reporting and population. If you click on the “participating agencies” section of the FBI data, it shows the number of agencies reporting the data and population covered. In 2016, there were 257 more reporting agencies than 2015 (15,254 vs. 14,997) covering a population of 5.9 million more people (289.8M vs. 283.9M).

This means that the 2016 data included 2% more people, so we’d assume a 2% increase in hate crimes all things being equal. It’s sort of like comparing real and nominal prices. So a 1% increase is arguably a 1% decline.

Either way it’s looked at, hate crimes remained essentially flat. This data proves nothing about the influence Trump rallies have on hate crimes, except that they appear to have no influence.

Overall, hate crimes increased by 4.6% throughout the country from 205-16. This means that the areas Trump visited actually fared better than the rest of the country on average. Of course, this small statistical correlation can’t be attributed to Trump, but it further knocks down the narrative of the meme and Post article.

More Context

If one is inclined, just about any narrative can be created by examining hate crime statistics. For example, anti-Hispanic hate crimes increased 15% from 2015-16, which out of context could be attributed to Trump’s rhetoric. But anti-black crimes declined by 1%, and anti-white crimes increased by 17%. The Trump rhetoric narrative also collapses when we see that white offenders actually declined by 3% in 2016, while Hispanic offenders increased by a whopping 40%!

However, lest the pro-Trump crowd get too excited, many of these narratives flipped in 2017 (the latest data available). Anti-Hispanic crimes rose at an even faster pace (24%) than anti-white crimes (3%) and this time white offenders increased by 20%, although Hispanic offenders increased again more than any other group by 38% (but still committed far fewer hate crimes than whites). Of course, we also need to factor in the increased reporting agencies in 2017, which covered 6% more people, which tempers these numbers a bit. It becomes clear that things get quite complicated and nuanced!

One interesting narrative that is never reported is that the least amount of hate crimes happen in some of the deepest parts of Trump country. Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas all had less than 10 hate crimes reported in the entire state during 2017, with Mississippi registering just 4, a decline of 60% from the year prior. These are supposedly the most racist areas of the US, yet have the fewest hate crimes. Compare them with Democrat strongholds like California, with a whopping 1,270 hate crimes in 2017 or Washington with 613, a strikingly high number considering their population. Yet, even this narrative collapses when we look at other red states like Kentucky (432) and South Carolina (94), who had huge percentage increases in hate crimes in 2017.

Historical context on hate crimes (not adjusted for population)

Conclusion

The purpose of pointing out these different narratives is to show how manipulative these sorts of statistics can be. Depending on one’s agenda, almost anything can be hyped up without context. But if we step back, the reality is that hate crimes are far lower today than they were two decades ago, particularly when factoring in increased population, and are not at alarming levels historically. This could change in the future, of course, but for now the fear is not based on facts, but media hype.

Regarding this particular claim, it’s completely detached from reality and the facts. Any researcher who understands hate crimes should know to use the FBI database, not the ADL’s. The fact that this was published by one of the nation’s largest newspapers and shared heavily by the media elites is shameful.