Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted a series of inaccurate murder statistics from the “Crime Statistics Bureau — San Francisco.” The bureau doesn’t exist and the statistics were fabricated. It appears the numbers were manipulated to perpetuate racism against African Americans. For example, the graphic claims that 81% of whites are killed by blacks. The actual percentage, based on the latest data from the FBI, is 14 percent.

The image began spreading on Twitter when it was posted by a neo-Nazi who uses a swastika as his avatar. The account almost exclusively tweets racist memes.


Some media outlets, however, took a very charitable approach to covering Trump’s tweet. The Hill, for example, wrote that Trump took “heat for a controversial tweet about black murder rates.”