Donald Trump's Claim That Joe Biden Called Black People 'Super Predators' Declared False By Fact Checkers
Donald Trump's accusation during the first presidential debate that Joe Biden referred to Black Americans as "super predators" has been declared "false" by fact checkers.
"I'm letting people out of jail now," Trump said to Biden during Tuesday night's debate. "You've treated the Black community as bad as anyone in the country. You called them superpredators and you've called them worse than that."
The Trump campaign has been working diligently to suppress the Black vote by multiple means, including repeatedly claiming that Black Americans have "nothing to lose" after years of alleged mistreatment by Democrats such as Biden.
However, the president's attack on Biden is categorically false. In fact, according to CNN fact checkers, Biden said the exact opposite:
Biden did warn in a 1993 speech of "predators on our streets" who were "beyond the pale" in support of the [1994] crime bill. The bill itself has come under heavy criticism in recent years for being among the policies that led to mass incarceration, disproportionately affecting Black men.
But Biden himself rejected the theory of “super predators.”
In a 1997 hearing arguing that most youth in the justice system weren’t violent, Biden said most youth weren’t “super predators.”
“In 1994, there were about 1.5 million juvenile delinquency cases,” Biden said then. “Less than 10% of those cases involved violent crimes. So when we talk about the juvenile justice system, we have to remember that most of the youth involved in the system are not the so-called ‘super predators.’”
Trump made a number of false and deliberately misleading claims during the debate, ranging from the Affordable Care Act to crime rates to unemployment numbers and even COVID-19. Here's a full summary of them.
