Donald Trump retweeted an image Sunday that compares black-on-black murders to police killings.
Trump’s @realDonaldTrump Twitter account highlighted a photograph featuring a dark-skinned man wearing a bandana, a dark shirt and military-style pants and holding a handgun sideways and claiming to list 2015 crime statistics.
It includes six lines. Two of them: “BLACKS KILLED BY POLICE ~~ 1%” and “BLACKS KILLED BY BLACKS ~~ 97%.”
The figures Trump retweeted overstate the number of homicides committed by blacks. It also doesn’t appear that the “Crime Statistics Bureau – San Francisco” that Trump’s retweet referenced exists. It’s not the name of a government agency.
According to FBI statistics, of the 2,451 homicides of black people in 2014, 90% were committed by black people, while 8% of the offenders were white.
That sort of racial disparity isn’t uncommon: Of the 3,021 homicides of white people in 2014, 82% were committed by white people, while 15% of the offenders were black. The figures Trump retweeted inaccurately stated that 81% of white homicide victims are killed by blacks.
The Justice Department maintains a Bureau of Justice Statistics, though its figures don’t match those Trump retweeted. The FBI’s uniform crime statistics lag by a year — with 2014 numbers only recently becoming available — and no federal government agency has produced such figures for 2015.
The Trump campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The retweet came two days after a half-dozen white attendees at a Trump rally shoved, tackled, punched and kicked a black protester who disrupted the business mogul’s speech.
“Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said Sunday morning on Fox News, less than 24 hours after his campaign said it “does not condone” the physical altercation.