Fact checking Nikki Haley’s CNN town hall in Iowa

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley participated in a CNN town hall in Iowa on Sunday. Though the former South Carolina governor correctly cited a variety of facts and figures, not everything she said was accurate.

Haley falsely claimed, as she has before, that crime is at an all-time high. While speaking about Covid-19, she falsely claimed that all medications on drugstore shelves are made in China. She also exaggerated the amount of unspent Covid-19 relief money.

Here is a fact check of those claims and several others made by the former US ambassador to the United Nations.

Haley spoke of her support for gun rights in general and for AR-15 ownership in particular, and of her opposition to red flag laws. She said: “When you’ve got crime at all-time highs, you’ve got illegal immigrants crossing the border, you’ve got mental health crisis as much as it is, the last thing I’m going to do is take away the ability for someone to protect themselves and their family.”

Facts First: Haley’s claim that crime is at “all-time highs” is not even close to true about the United States as a whole. There was far more crime in the US in the early 1990s than there is today; crime has declined steeply over the past three decades, though there have been some intermittent upticks along the way.

We do not yet have national crime data for 2023 or 2022, and even the 2021 data is flawed. But experts say it is clear, based on the figures we do have, that US crime levels are nowhere near what they were in the early 1990s. In 1992, for example, the US violent crime rate was about 758 per 100,000 people. Though there was an uptick in 2020, the violent crime rate remained below 400 per 100,000 people even that year. And there is no sign of a spike between 2020 and the present that would put the country even close to 1990s levels.

In fact, Jeff…