By the time this piece will be out, you'll have heard more than your fair share of selective fact-checking, data twisting and 'expert' punditry surrounding the first presidential debate. This is definitely a delayed response, but I can assure you it will be a different one.
I hadn't really walked into the debate with any expectations, and, that said, I wasn't surprised by any of its content. The patterns were anything but unusual: convenient disregard of the moderator's question for agenda advancement, petty personal attacks, unrelated, feel-good one-liners, and ludicrously repetitive emphasis on insignificant issues and micro-scandals. It would be a lie to say that one candidate did this more than the other.
One section, while not surprising me, really caught my eye. Its start was marked as the drunken raucousness of the college pub turned down to an awkward, nervous hush. The predominantly white crowd watched on as both candidates attempted to answer Lester Holt's question regarding the racial divide. At this point, the topic was of equal intrigue to those covered in the rest of the debate for me. I don't follow this issue any more than the other topics that had been covered up until this point, so I watched on without any special interest.
Hillary Clinton bumbled through various issues surrounding the topic of this racial divide, without really addressing any specific policy measures, other than vaguely referencing her 'plan' to somehow magically fix said racial divide by making police suck less and controlling gun sales. Donald Trump managed to bring up his personal investments within the first few seconds of his speech, while still roughly managing to stay on topic for the first bit of his discourse. Perhaps, this was a convoluted way of demonstrating that he cared about this issue. Whatever the case, nothing up until this point had stood out to me.
Of course, one of the core hypocrisies of this segment was that neither candidate seemed to have any interest whatsoever in issues other than crime when discussing this racial divide. Yes, Clinton mentioned elementary education, housing, and incarceration in passing, but her conclusion and policy measures were entirely centered around crime, violence and the justice system. To think that neither candidate even brushed the issues of neighborhood segregation, income inequality, higher education, and food deserts, just to name a few, that still disproportionately affect nonwhites, is insulting.
Trump, later on, makes a very valid point about how "[politicians] talk good around election time" and then leave nonwhites out to dry for the rest of the election cycle, as if it were to excuse his lack of any interest in improving the racial divide in America. Clinton, meanwhile, later drowns herself in hypocrisy when she states that "implicit bias is a problem for everyone", and that "too many of us... jump to conclusions about each other". Of course, a sterling example of this was provided by both herself and Trump, seeing that they both had previously answered a question about improving equality for nonwhites by showcasing their criminal justice and gun control endeavors. No obvious, outdated conclusions about nonwhite people made there.
Putting aside either candidate's inexcusable ineptitude with this issue, it was the second part of Trump's initial answer that drew me in. The half glass of beer (aptly called Fin du Monde) that I'd consumed kicked in when Trump started zoning in on inner cities and the supposedly huge levels of crime going on in predominantly Black and Hispanic sections therein. The impression of the 'inner city' as being a zone of dangerous minority-led gangs waiting to draw a gun on any passersby is outdated, racist, and inaccurate.
Fact-checkers on the media's left had a field day with Trump's comments, particularly with his focus on New York and Chicago. NPR needed a "Justice Correspondent" to inform its audience that, while Trump was right about recent increases in violent crime, Chicago's issues with it are only so bad in select neighborhoods. Vox ensures its readers that the stat could just be a "one-off" and that Trump's diagnosis of the findings is misleading. The New York Times also points out that New York crime rates are down, despite Trump's claims.
These corrections are vapid and serve only to advance the left's narrative, missing the real problem in Trump's arguments entirely. The question concerned a broad racial divide, Trump's response was about perceived inner-city crime concerning Black and Hispanic groups, and the fact-checking cited long-term crime rates in entire metropolitan areas. The rebuttals of Trump's claims arguably missed the point of the question more than Trump did. And in a characteristic episode of lazy rhetoric recycling and superficial statistic repetition, it failed to pay any attention the part where he specifically singled out the inner-city areas.
Both candidates are right; crime is a problem that disproportionally affects nonwhite communities. Trump's outlining of Chicago is especially pertinent in this case, to his credit. It's enough of a problem that the time they spent focusing on it was well-warranted, ignoring their dismissal of any other factors concerning the racial divide. It's Trump's claim that inner-cities are hotspots that is problematic, incomplete and misleading. This is also a claim that went completely unchecked.
FBI's latest data, the same data Trump used to justify his claims, shows that Chicago's violent crime rate is 9 per 1000 people per year. Unfortunately, the report does not include neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis of Chicago itself - this is addressed later. Chicago's racial makeup, according to the 2010 Census, is 45.0% white. Once again, this covers Chicago as a whole city. Suburban areas, such as Riverside, mapped here, are thus included in this data, skewing the crime rate high.
Even with this in mind, Harvey, IL, mapped here, with a population that is 9.95% white, according to the 2010 Census, suffered through a significantly higher 12 violent crimes per 1000 people in 2015, according to the same set of data Trump used. Similarly, Maywood, IL, mapped here, had 10 violent crimes per 1000 people in 2015, with a population that is 12.6% white.
Using data from the Chicago Tribune allows a more in-depth analysis of inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago. The highest violent crime rate within the city of Chicago occurred in the neighborhood of West Garfield Park, with a rate of nearly 4 reports per thousand people over the past 30 days. If it kept that rate up for a year, that would mean nearly 48 per thousand per year. Data from 2010 census tracts shows this neighborhood to also be highly nonwhite. However, classifying West Garfield Park as an 'inner-city neighborhood' is a stretch, to say the least, although Trump would argue that it is still viable. In fact, any neighborhood adjacent to the Loop, which is what I would constitute as the 'inner-city', had rates below 1.5 per thousand over the last month, and the vast majority were well under 1 per thousand.
And Chicago is an outlier in America - perhaps why Trump pointed it out. If one interpreted the data differently, his claims would actually make some sense. The inner-city is an inherently better location in just about any American metropolis. In fact, it's the suburban and outer-city neighborhoods with high minority concentrations that are far more frightening. Because they are much more poorly connected to transportation infrastructure, issues such as food deserts, endless commute times, and poor education access are exacerbated. Ongoing gentrification in American cities is now, and has been, driving many Black and minority populations out of inner-city neighborhoods, and into the suburbs, destroying community ties and leading to the issues mentioned above.
Trump's outlining of the inner-city as the hotspot of racial segregation and crime is thus empirically misled, and more importantly misidentifies the trend ongoing in American cities. The issue is the opposite - it's the rich, white takeover of historic urban neighborhoods that is a key driving force in exacerbating the racial divide. Yet no media response directed any attention to disproving his almost classic 'inner-city' fear-mongering rhetoric, despite it being the most provable and most frightening fault in his argument. It reflects a deliberate bipartisan ignorance of the real issues affecting cities and the racial divide.