Washington Post Fact Checks Biden's about Rising Crime Rates:

 When is a decrease being called a "tripling" of the same rate?  When you are Joe Biden.  The Washington Post does a fantastic job fact checking the story we blogged about with below.  Kudos Washington Post - they gave Biden FOUR PINOCCHIO'S for this whopper!

Flint is certainly a violent city, ranked number one in many categories. The website of the Flint Police Department only gives data through 2008, but both the FBI and the Michigan State Police have more recent figures that are provided to them by the Flint police. The numbers are not precisely the same because of different reporting requirements, but they are roughly the same—and show a different picture than reported by Biden.
The Flint website for 2008 shows the same figures that Biden cited: 35 murders and 91 rapes.
Here’s what the FBI shows:

2008

City of Flint: 32 murders, 103 rapes 
Surrounding area: 37 murders, 239 rapes
RATE PER 100,000 INHABITANTS: murder, 8.6; rape 55.5

2009

City of Flint: 36 murders, 91 rapes
Surrounding area: 44 murders, 235 rapes
 RATE PER 100,000 INHABITANTS: murder, 10.3; rape, 55.1

2010

City of Flint: 53 murders, 92 rapes
Surrounding area: 58 murders, 225 rapes
RATE PER 100,000 INHABITANTS: murder, 13.8; rape 53.7
More important than the raw figures is the rate per 100,000 individuals. Murder did go up—though the rate did not double from 2009 to 2010, as Biden claimed. But rape has gone down. Biden actually asserted it had tripled.

The statement, however, was strangely silent on the massive discrepancy in the rape statistics. There have been a number of studies (see here and here) that document that the FBI statistics do not capture all forms of rape. The FBI stats include forcible intercourse but not oral sex or other forms of sexual assault.
 But that issue does not explain why Biden’s rape statistics would be so much higher than what was reported in the local press over the years. The Flint Journal on May 24, in fact, reported the number of rapes had declined in the city from 2009 to 2010.
Jones, in an interview, said that the city had never released the broader rape figure to the public until the vice president’s office requested the data. “We have never shared that number,” she said, agreeing that it was strange that Flint’s official rape figure for 2008—91--was actually lower than the FBI figure for that year, even with the FBI’s more narrow definition of rape.