Trump Earlier This Year Infuriated El Paso With Lies About Its Crime Rate

President Donald Trump, who now hails the incredible people of El Paso, Texas and condemns the hate that apparently fueled Saturdays mass shooting that killed at least 22 people in the city, just months ago unjustly and erroneously smeared the border community.

In his February State of the Union address to Congress, he derided El Paso as one of Americas most dangerous cities with an extremely high crime rate before a barrier was constructed along its boundary with Mexico flatly contradicting the facts.

Crime statistics show El Paso has been one of the nations safest cities for decades, and its officials joined in a chorus to quickly slam Trumps lies about it in his nationally televised speech.

Democratic presidential contender and former Rep. Beto ORourke , an El Paso native whose district included the city, complained to The Washington Post at the time that Trump is just full-on, in the most racist terms, completely divorced from ... reality concerning its crime. He said the president uses this to incite fear and paranoia.

Authorities are now examining a manifesto echoing some of Trumps same anti-Mexican rhetoric that allegedly was written and posted online shortly before Saturdays shooting by the alleged killer, Patrick Crusius, 21. The manifesto refers to the Hispanic invasion of Texas, and the massacre occurred at a Walmart known to be popular with Mexican-Americans and Mexicans .

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who last November won ORourkes former House seat, sent Trump a letter after his State of the Union remarks demanding an apology for his politically motivated distortions, which she said were harmful to our reputation and degrade our spirit.

El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said in a statement that it was sad to hear President Trump state falsehoods about El Paso in an attempt to justify the building of a 2,000-mile wall. El Paso was a safe city long before any wall was built.

Construction of its border barrier wasnt begun until 2008. In the 30 years ending in 2015, El Pasos violent crime rate consistently fell well below rates in similar-sized cities, according to the FBIs Uniformed Crime Reporting data , Snopes reports.

The violent crime rate in El Paso peaked in 1993 (similar to other U.S. cities), according to local and federal statistics analyzed by The El Paso Times. It fell by 34% from then to 2006. From two years before the wall was built to two years after, violent crime actually rose 17% before it returned to a downward trend.

Saturdays death toll exceeded the yearly average of murders in El Paso over the last decade.

From 2009 to 2018, the city has averaged 16 murders annually, according to statistics released early this year by its police department. That number has been slightly higher in the most recent years the average has been 18 murders a year since 2014.