From [HERE] One of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign themes was that the United States is experiencing a crime plague of historical proportions. On Feb. 7, the newly elected chief executive invited a group of county sheriffs to the White House -- and proceeded to cite a startling crime statistic.

"The murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right?" Trump said. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that -- I’d say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesn’t tell it like it is. It wasn’t to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest it’s been in, I guess, from 45 to 47 years."

Racism is a virus in the mind.  The national homicide rate is considerably lower than its peak in the 1990s.

Specifically, the number of murders declined by 42 percent between 1993 and 2014, even as the U.S. population rose by 25 percent over the same period. So while homicides have recently risen -- a legitimate concern, experts say -- they are far below their high levels of the early 1990s, when the nation’s population was much smaller.

"Violent crime rates are up compared with historic lows, and they are still very, very low compared with just five or 10 years ago," Raymond Paternoster, a University of Maryland criminologist, told us in October.

But racists live in their imagination. Fuck reality. [MORE] According to FUNKTIONARY, to "believe" is to wish one had proof or could rely on the illusion of proof to uphold a cherished assumption not based in or supported by the fundamental nature and workings of reality. All believing is make believing b/c to know, only you just have to know; whereas to believe, you have to make others believe also."

Trump knows what his believers want to hear. He knows that they want to be deceieved. 

Despite double-digit percentage decreases in U.S. violent and property crime rates since 2008, most white voters say crime has gotten worse during that span, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The disconnect is nothing new, though: white mericans’ perceptions of crime are often at odds with the data.

Leading up to Election Day, a majority (57%) of those who had voted or planned to vote said crime has gotten worse in this country since 2008. Almost eight-in-ten voters who supported President-elect Donald Trump (78%) said this, as did 37% of backers of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Just 5% of pro-Trump voters and a quarter of Clinton supporters said crime has gotten better since 2008, according to the survey of 3,788 adults conducted Oct. 25-Nov. 8.

Official government crime statistics paint a strikingly different picture. Between 2008 and 2015 (the most recent year for which data are available), U.S. violent crime and property crime rates fell 19% and 23%, respectively, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which tallies serious crimes reported to police in more than 18,000 jurisdictions around the nation.

Another Justice Department agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, produces its own annual crime report, based on a survey of more than 90,000 households that counts crimes that aren’t reported to police in addition to those that are. BJS data show that violent crime and property crime rates fell 26% and 22%, respectively, between 2008 and 2015 (again, the most recent year available)." [MORE]

Dr. Amos Wilson offers the following to explain the disconnect with reality: 

White American Paranoia

To look at the world or a segment of it with a rigid, hyper-alert, and all-consuming expectation — to search reality repetitively only for confirmation of one's suspicions while ignoring aspects of that reality which disconfirm those suspicions; to pay no attention to opposing rational arguments, cogent, well-founded evidence, except to find in them only those features that seem to confirm one's original views; to examine reality with extraordi­nary prejudice, rejecting facts, information and alternative possibilities while seizing on and exaggerating any scintilla of often irrelevant evidence that supports one's original expectations — denotes a driven need: a psychoneurotic, psychopathological need to defend an ego perilously in danger of disintegration and to defend it regardless of cost to oneself and others. Such a suspicious and paranoid orientation speaks to the need to rigidly construct and control reality so as to maintain self-control, to empower the ego and to gainfully exploit a relevant situation. This rigidity of attention, stereotypical viewing of the world; this chronic condition of hyper-alertness, hypersensitivity; this need to create the world according to one's own deluded images, to subject others to one's paranoid views, to exploitatively have them serve that need, bespeaks the greater need to gain ego satisfaction and enhancement, self-definition and material gain through manipulating the behavior and consciousness over others. Paradoxically, this greater need bespeaks a fundamental dependency on a world and others and simultaneously, of a protest against and denial of that dependency. It expresses an ego vulnerability which must remain defensively hidden, an ego weakness which must appear to itself and others as strength, an extremely tense, unstable ego whose tenuous equilibrium can only be maintained by projecting that tension and vulnerability into the world and others. Thus the keeper of law comes to need the outlaw. And needing him, creates him. The keeper of the disturbs the peace by projecting hallucinated hostile threats where they do not exist.

That the White American must see virtually every Black male as criminal or as a potential criminal regardless of facts to the contrary, bespeaks an intense psychic need of White America to perceive him as such.

What does White America have to gain from choosing to perceive Black males as stereotypically criminal? By socio-psychologically inducing Black males into criminality? Following the trend of thought set forth by Michael Lewis in his book, The Culture of Inequality, alleged Black male criminality is a comfort to White America despite its protestations to the contrary. Alleged Black criminality, while evoking White American fear and loathing, reassures them of their vaunted self-worth, their assumed innately superior moral standing, of their selfcongratulatory self-constraint in contrast with presumed Black American unworthiness, innate inferior moral standing, inherent criminality, lack of self-constraint and self-control. White America's self-appreciation is enhanced as it insatiably feeds on overblown reports about Black criminality while denying its own incomparable criminal record, and its own racist-imperialist incubation and giving birth to the very same criminal forces which now threaten to destroy it.

Black criminals function as a negative reference group vital to maintaining the White American self-image.

Black criminals function as a negative reference group vital to maintaining the White American self-image. The Black criminal is used to support the White American community's self-serving, self-justifying judgments of itself. White America's preoccupation with Black criminality betrays its own need for reassurance; betrays its own basic insecurity regarding its projected moral purity. Consequently, the higher the incidence of reported Black criminality, the more exceptionally righteous White America feels itself to be. The more righteous it feels itself to be the more intensely and guiltlessly it promulgates and justifies its domination and exploitation of African peoples at home and abroad. The alleged innate criminality of Black America, particularly of Black males, and their actual high level of self-destructive criminality remain incontrovertible psycho-political necessities if the White American-Eurocentric culture of inequality is to be self-justifiably continued without end. In the context of this collective necessity, more Blacks are arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to longer prison terms for allegedly committing the same type of crimes as Whites. Many are arrested, charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms merely for committing the crime of being Black in America. 

The White American community's need to stereotypically perceive Blacks as innately criminal, coupled with its socioeco­nomic power to control the availability of resources and their renumerative allocation, confers on it the power of creating or controlling circumstances conducive to the satisfaction of its hegemonic requirements. Under these circumstances, the need of the collective White ego to project an image of endemic Black criminality in order to maintain its power status quo, is tanta­mount to the creation of Black criminality, particularly of the self-destructive kind. [MORE]