Trump and a coffee cup

Donald Trump has made a lot of news lately with immigration.  Like a lot of his ilk, he tells half truths and then falls back on the truth to back up his half-truth.  Before I go into Trump's accusations, I'll use this coffee cup meme as an example of what I mean.  

Every year on average, 35,000 white women are raped by black men, while under 10 black women are raped by white men.  Source US Justice Dept
#racetogether

This meme is a half-truth.  There are some truths in it, but there is a enough falsehood and lack of context in the meme to make it only half true.

First, this is the data that the meme is referring to from the US Justice Department.

Chart edited to show only data relevant to the discussion

Here we come to the first blatant falsehood in this meme. The chart says 16.4% of 117,640 rape/sexual assaults of white victims are committed by black offenders.  The data does not give information for rape alone.  The second blatant falsehood has to do with the meme's lack of Junior High math skills.   16.4% of 117,640 is 19,293, not 35,000.  Even allowing for the rape/sexual assault error, the real number is only 54% of what the meme claims. Later, we will get into how Trump inflates his numbers as well to exaggerate a problem.

Still, one might respond, "It is still a disparity, 0% of black women had rape/sexual assaults from white offenders".  With two falsehoods down, now we get into the misrepresentation of the context of the data.  In this chart the asterisk are important.

Crime (particularly sex crime) is under reported. The purpose of this report is for the Justice Department to make competent projections about the total number of crimes. Interracial sex crime is so rare that there are 10 or fewer sample cases for this report to speculate from.  All of the follow have 10 or fewer sample cases.

• Black on white
• Other on white
• Not known or not available on white
• White on black
• Black on black
• Other on black
• Not known or not available on black

The data is not that great.  Given this context any speculations are very, very tentative.  

Finally who is most likely to rape/sexually assault white women?  Almost 75% of the offenders were white; 88,112 compared to 19,293.  The overwhelming danger to white women is not from black men, but from white men.  This last bit of context destroys the implication of the meme.  

In summary

1. It is rape/sexual assault not rape.
2. It is about 19,000 not 35,000 (a 54% difference).
3. The data is based on 10 or fewer samples.
4. White women are far more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted by white men.

Sure, someone could cite case after case of black men raping/sexually assaulting white women. There should be thousands of them. They could say, "See black men do rape white women, just like I said."  However what they actually said was grossly exaggerated and stripped from context.  There are thousands of black on white cases, but there are tens of thousands of white on white cases.

Trump said that illegal immigrants were rapists and murders with the implication being that there is a large amount of crime committed by illegal immigrants.  When challenged, he sought to prove that some illegal immigrants were rapists. Yes that's true, some illegal immigrants are rapists, as are some Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Irish, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc...  Still accusing a particular group of being rapists has the implication that they are more rapey than others and this has not been demonstrated to be the case.  In fact when illegal immigration peaked crime rates continued to decline.  

Trump also speculates, with no real evidence, that the number of illegal immigrants is 34 million, more than three times the actual rate.  The actual number is is about 11 million.  He also claims that the rate of illegal immigration is increasing and there are more illegal immigrants than ever before.  As mentioned above the rate is declining.  

If you challenge Trump, he will fall back to the facts to defend his half-truths.  There are illegal immigrants who rape and murder.  However as Trump surely knows that is by far not most of them.

Trump's strategy of stereotyping illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers could be applied to legal immigrants or any sizable group in the country. There is no real evidence that illegal immigrants rape or murder more than the population as a whole. However, there are groups that do disproportionally rape and murder who are trying to fight stereotyping their whole group.

PS

John Nolte at Breitbart says he does not care if illegal immigrants commit crimes at higher or lower rates.  The point he argues is they never should have been around to commit the crime to begin with.

Trump needs to get these numbers out there and remind America’s Anderson Coopers and Chuck Todds that it doesn’t matter how these numbers compare to similar offenses committed by Americans and legal immigrants. The fact that more than a thousand children have been sexually assaulted by illegals — people who never should have been able to get in the country to begin with — is unconscionable and unacceptable.

These children are victims of our feckless government and the media the covers for them.
Democrats and the media aren’t willing to secure the border to save one child from sexual assault, much less near a thousand.

Who are the real monsters here?

The media will cover shark attacks, but not near a thousand children sexually assaulted by illegals?

In fairness the media also will not cover the amount of children sexually assaulted by non-illegals which is orders of magnitude higher.  Still, to Nolte, the point is that these are preventable crimes.