Cory Booker's misleading crime statistic backfires

Immigrant children are dying at the border, President Trump boasts of being "locked and loaded" against Iran and the Amazon rainforest is burning. No wonder critics say we media workers should not be spending time on presidential candidates' gaffes.

But this is also a time when the value of inconvenient facts is itself under siege, not insignificantly by a president who has topped 12,000 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker database. There may be little hope that Trump will change his fact-challenged ways, but that doesn't mean his Democratic rivals or the rest of us should join him.

With that in mind, I bristled at the sound of Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey repeating a misleading statement that he has used before in his talking points: "We have more African Americans under criminal supervision today than all the slaves in 1850."

Booker's reasons for making the claim, usually with great passion, are obvious. It's a showstopper. It's dramatic and alarming but also, in several unfortunate ways, wrong.

Alas, it is not totally wrong. Booker's mistake was in leaving out a crucial word: men.

He would have been right if he had said there are more black men under criminal supervision today than were in slavery in 1850.

A PolitiFact fact check back in 2014 backs that up. "There were about 1.68 million African American men under state and federal criminal justice supervision in 2013," it said, which was "807,076 more than the number of black men who were enslaved in 1850."

Author and scholar Michelle Alexander got that right in her best-selling 2010 book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," which appears to be the source that eventually led Booker, among countless others -- including me -- to cite this chilling statistic over the years.

But Booker didn't quote it correctly and that's a problem. Even when the statistics are cited correctly, they can be misleading without some context. The overall U.S. population has soared since 1850. As a measure of racial progress -- or lack of it -- over time it is more useful to cite the percentages than the raw numbers.

Without plunging too deeply into the woods of the numbers, the Census Bureau reported nearly 39 million African Americans in 2010, which was more than 10 times the black population in 1850, when there were were 3.6 million African Americans, 3.2 million of whom were slaves in the U.S. population.

The danger in using such statistics too frivolously is that they can be used to bolster negative stereotypes instead of knocking them down. "For every person who believes that the over-representation of blacks in the prison system is proof of the bias inherent in the system," wrote Alfred Edmond Jr., an editor-at-large at Black Enterprise magazine, "there is at least one other who believes that such disproportionate representation is proof positive that black men are more prone to crime and violence -- and worse, that most black men are guilty until proven innocent. Statistics and facts can be used to define and defend, or to demonize and destroy."

That's why veteran journalist Richard Prince highlighted the misleading Booker statistics and Edmond's essay in Journal-isms, his online column on diversity issues in news media. "Sen. Booker, please stop," Prince wrote. Most reporters aren't calling him on it, Prince wrote, although we should.

I agree. There are enough dangerous stereotypes in circulation, and more than enough suspicious about "fake news" even when the reporting is true, for us to take misleading statements lightly.

I like to think that Booker simply made an honest mistake, as many of us might in the heat of passionate argument or a high-stakes debate. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who often is called a "gaffe machine," fairly or not, apparently made a similar error in the Houston debate as he defended his own record on criminal justice issues.

"Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime," Biden said. "When we were in the White House, we released 36,000 people from the federal prison system."

Shortly after that, he seemed to correct himself by saying "nobody should be in jail for a drug problem," which his spokespeople later said was what he meant to say the first time.

Good save? Probably so, based on the goodwill he has built up over time. Just as many in Donald Trump's loyal base shrug off his many gaffes -- and outright whoppers -- voters are willing to forgive what they see as small offenses as they pursue larger goals.

But if facts are going to matter in what too often feels like a "post-truth" political era, their value must be protected by all political sides.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)