Fact check: Springfield had more murders under Trump than under Biden-Harris

Washington (CNN) — Facing intense criticism for promoting false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting and eating other residents’ pets, Sen. JD Vance has tried to pivot by blaming Vice President Kamala Harris and the influx of Haitians during her vice presidency for a variety of broader social issues in the city.

Some of those issues have been widely acknowledged, such as a strain on the local health care system. But Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, added a startling claim in a CNN television interview on Sunday: that Harris and the immigrant influx have caused a big spike in murder.

“I’m talking to my constituents and I’m hearing terrible things about what’s going on in Springfield, and Kamala Harris’ open-border policies have caused these problems,” Vance said. Moments later, he said, “Murders are up by 81% because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen to this small community.”

We looked into this claim and found it’s a good example of how statistics can be cherry-picked and misleadingly framed to serve unfounded narratives.

“During the time that I’ve been with the prosecutor’s office, which is 21 years now, we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community – as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders,” Daniel Driscoll, the Republican top prosecutor in Clark County, in which Springfield is the largest city, said in a Friday interview.

Vance was citing real data, but he didn’t mention what the underlying numbers are.
Spokesperson William Martin said Vance was talking about official Ohio figures showing that Springfield had five murders in 2021 and nine murders in 2023.

That four-murder increase is indeed an increase of 80%. An increase from five murders one year to nine murders two years later, though, does not prove Vance’s claim that Harris and immigrants have caused a murder spike — or even that there is a current murder spike.

In small communities, Driscoll said, “if you were to have one murder one year and two murders the next year, you’ve suddenly got a 100% increase in the rate, but that’s not an appreciable difference in the number of murders you have.” He said what he looks at is “trends” — and “we’ve not seen any trend showing that the amount of murders is going up in Clark County.”

Here are five significant problems with Vance’s narrative:

1) Springfield had more total murders under President Donald Trump than under Biden-Harris.

Vance said murders in Springfield have soared “because of” Harris’ policies. But a quick glance at Springfield’s murder numbers for the last three presidential terms – which are easily available online from the FBI and the state of Ohio – immediately calls his assertion into question.

President Barack Obama’s second term: 30 murders. Six in 2013; seven in 2014; 12 in 2015; five in 2016.

Trump’s term: 33 murders. Nine in 2017 (he took over from Obama on January 20 that year); 13 in 2018; three in 2019; eight in 2020.

President Joe Biden’s term through 3.5 years: 22 murders. Five in 2021 (he took over from Trump on January 20 that year); six in 2022; nine in 2023; two in the first half of 2024.

Even if you exclude the half-year 2024 data and only compare the three completed years of the Biden-Harris administration to either the first three years or last three years under the Trump administration, there have still been fewer murders under Biden-Harris.

2) Murder in Springfield was down significantly in the first half of 2024.

Vance didn’t mention that the same official Ohio data he cited for 2021 to 2023 shows that Springfield had just two murders from January through June 2024, the most recent period for which the official data is available. Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, told CNN that his own tracking shows Springfield was still at two murders through July — a decrease of 60%, Asher said, from five murders through the same point of last year.

It’s possible that the rest of 2024 will be worse. But it’s also possible that the full-year 2024 number will end up down from 2021 or just slightly up from 2021, rendering Vance’s 80% increase obsolete. At the very least, the early-2024 number should caution against treating the 2023 number as evidence of an ongoing upward trend.

3) There is no evidence immigrants caused even the 2021-to-2023 increase.

As we’ve repeatedly noted in fact checks about crime, identifying specific reasons for particular cities’ increases or decreases in any given year is notoriously difficult. And nobody has demonstrated that Haitian immigrants in particular or immigrants in general were responsible for the four additional murders in 2023 compared to 2021. (One prominent local case from 2023, in which a Haitian immigrant committed aggravated vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally crashed his minivan into a school bus and killed a child, is not classified as a murder, and the child’s father has said explicitly that it was not a murder.)

Local and state officials have certainly not attributed the uptick in murder to immigrants. Driscoll described it as “luck, or a lack thereof.” And Andy Wilson, now Ohio’s public safety director under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and formerly the Clark County prosecutor before Driscoll, told reporters this week that the main public safety issue with regard to Haitian immigrants in the state is safe driving, “not crime” and “not violence.”

4) Small numbers mean big percentage changes.

It’s not clear that there was any particular social, political or economic reason behind the 2021-to-2023 increase Vance was citing. When the absolute number of murders is as low as it is in Springfield, a tiny number of random happenings — one resolved or unresolved dispute, one bullet fired a bit to the left or right, one unusually slow or fast ambulance response — can cause impressive-sounding percentage changes in the annual figures.

Driscoll said he has seen people shot in the head who survive and people shot in the arm who die. “The difference between a shooting victim and murder victim is sometimes millimeters,” he said.

Springfield’s murder numbers have fallen within a narrow range, from a low of three murders to a high of 13 murders, for a full decade — and the high of 13 and the low of three were set under Trump in consecutive years, 2018 and 2019. It wouldn’t make sense to blame Trump for the high (which was a 44% spike from the year prior) or credit him for the low (which was a 77% decline from the year prior), since these numbers fluctuate for reasons even the local police have said are hard to pinpoint.

“Given that murders are rare, there is a ton of variation from year to year that is best explained as random, especially when the murder total is small,” Asher said in an email. “There is a lot of random variation that goes into whether a shooting victim dies, and sometimes you’ll see increasing shootings but decreasing fatalities in a year with the opposite occurring the following year.”

5) Comparing 2023 to Trump-era 2020 would show a much smaller increase than the one Vance mentioned.

Vance bolstered his case against Harris by choosing to compare 2023, when there were nine murders in Springfield, to 2021, when there were five murders there. But since more than 11 months of 2021 fell under the Biden-Harris administration, it would arguably make more sense to compare 2023 to 2020, the last full calendar year under Trump, if you are at least attempting to assess the impact of Biden-Harris policies.

Doing that 2023-to-2020 comparison would yield a 13% increase, from eight murders in 2020 to nine murders in 2023. Again, that is likely just random variation — but it’s not 80%.

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