News Reporter: Fact Checker: 57 claims. Four days. Fact-checking the 2016 Republican National Convention

The truth behind the rhetoric

57 claims. Four days. Fact-checking the 2016 Republican National Convention

Happy RNC week! We now officially have a Republican presidential and vice presidential nominee in #TrumpPence2016.

We fact-checked 57 claims over four days. We’ve included many of them below.

Read the rest of our round-ups here: Day 1 (Melania, Benghazi, Joni Ernst and more) // Day 2 (Mitch McConnell, Chris Christie, Paul Manafort and more) // Day 3 (mostly VP Mike Pence) // Day 4 (featuring 25 claims from Donald J. Trump)

"The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year."

–Donald Trump

This is wrong.

The number of law enforcement officers killed on the job has increased 8 percent compared to this point in 2015. He may be referring to the total number of officers killed in shootings, which has increased 78 percent. This includes the recent shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

The overall number of police deaths has decreased in the past two decades. For the past 10 to 15 years, traffic-related incidents (including criminal pursuit and instances where officers are intentionally struck by offenders) have been the leading cause of death among police officers.

"Yet, there I was a few days ago in New York City with the man who won 37 states … faced 16 talented opponents and outlasted every one of them … and along the way brought millions of new voters into the Republican Party."

— Mike Pence

Trump often claims that he has brought "millions of new voters" into the GOP, but that has been disputed by analyses by The Washington Post andPolitico.

As Politico put it, "early statistics show that the vast majority of those voters aren't actually new to voting or to the Republican Party, but rather they are reliable past voters in general elections. They are only casting ballots in a Republican primary for the first time."

"Homicides last year increased by 17 percent in America's 50 largest cities. That's the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation's capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60 percent in nearby Baltimore."

–Donald Trump

Trump cherry-picks data to paint an alarming picture of homicide trends, when in reality, they have been declining for decades.

In 2015, there was an uptick in homicides in 36 of the 50 largest cities compared to the previous years. The rate did, indeed, increase nearly 17 percent, and it was the worst annual change since 1990. The homicide rate was up 54.3 percent in Washington, and 58.5 percent in Baltimore.

But in the first months of 2016, homicide trends were about evenly split in the major cities. Out of 63 agencies reporting to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, 32 cities saw a decrease in homicides in first quarter 2016 and 31 saw an increase.

The problem with cherry-picking such data is that crime trends are measured over decades of data. Many factors — even weather — can drive crime numbers up or down at a given short period of time. In reality, homicides and overall violent crime, in both raw number and rates per population, have been on a decades-long decline in major cities.

Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we’ll check it out.

"She even lied about sniper fire. Why, even she lied about why her parents named her Hillary."

— Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Hillary Clinton's false claim of landing under sniper fire in Bosnia is one of the all-time great fact-checks at the Fact Checker. But some viewers of the Republican National Convention may have been confused about McConnell's charge that Clinton lied about her name.

But this is indeed the case. Snopes looked deeply into this issue in 2003 and concluded that Clinton had told a fishy tale to curry favor with the people of Nepal during a visit there in 1995, when she was first lady. After meeting Edmund Hillary, the first to conquer Mount Everest, Clinton claimed that her mother had read about the famous climber and knew his name had two L's. "So when I was born, she called me Hillary, and she always told me, 'It's because of Sir Edmund Hillary,’" Clinton said.

But there were problems with this story. Edmund Hillary, with Tenzing Norgay, reached the summit in 1953 — six years after Clinton was born. The mountain climber was not necessarily obscure in the year Clinton was born, but Snopes could find no evidence that he was mentioned in Midwestern newspapers before 1953. Moreover, this appeared to have been the one and only time that Clinton had ever made reference to this story — and she never repeated it in her 2003 memoir. (But her husband mentioned it in his memoir.)

In 2006, as Clinton was preparing to run for president, a spokeswoman conceded that Clinton was not named for the climber. "It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results, I might add," said Jennifer Hanley, a spokeswoman for the campaign.

Snopes didn’t buy this revisionist spin.

"After obtaining a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia, Melania was jetting between photo shoots in Paris and Milan, finally settling in New York in 1996."

— Bio of Melania Trump on the convention program

Melania Trump's speaker bio claimed that she obtained a degree at a college in Slovenia, something that she also claims on her bio on her website. But that's false, according to journalists who have looked into the matter. In reality, she dropped out of school after the first year and switched to a full-time modeling career.

Her biographers Bojan Pozar and Igor Omerza have called her out on the claim in "Melania Trump: The Inside Story, From a Slovenian Communist Village to the White House," which the New Yorker magazine described as the most thorough biographical account of her life. In the book, the authors detail then-Melanija Knavs's brief time at the University of Ljubljana, a university in Slovenia.

"In her freshman year, the 19-year-old Melanija Knavs attended lectures on the following subjects: elements of architecture, fine arts, fundamentals of technical mechanics, architectural construction, descriptive geometry, mathematics, and an ideological (read "communist") elective credit called "General Partisan Resistance and Social Self-protection." Melanija would have made it to her sophomore year, even having failed 2 exams, but she was supposed to have gotten and held a 1-month internship and kept a journal about it."

Knavs dropped out of college and later married the man who is now the Republican presidential nominee. Once Melania Trump told American media that she had obtained a degree, Slovenian journalists started digging into it. The biographers wrote: “Her thesis couldn't be found in the university system or the country's national register of publications, journalists started asking for direct and official answers from the heads of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana as to whether Melanija Knavs had graduated or not.

Julia Ioffe reported in Politico that Melania Trump's college boyfriend, high school best friend and the University of Ljubljana confirmed that she dropped out of college before obtaining a degree. As the biographers did, Ioffe also found that there was no thesis by Melanija Knavs "anywhere in the registry, though all Slovenes who graduate write a thesis, and all of these theses are catalogued."

"In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control."

–Donald Trump

This is an interesting list, but aspects are not factually correct.

The Islamic State of today is simply an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was established in April 2004 by longtime Sunni extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to the National Counterterrorism Center. Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006, and afterward his successor announced the formation of the Islamic State — more than two years before George W. Bush left office.

The Islamic State certainly gained strength and territory from the civil war in Syria, but Clinton as secretary of state had pressed to funnel arms to the rebels; she was rebuffed by the president.

Libya, Syria and Egypt were run by dictators in 2009, but it's odd to somehow suggest the 2011 uprising in those countries against the repressive regimes had much to do with U.S. policy.

As for sanctions against Iran, they did not really begin to bite until new ones were imposed by the Obama administration under the direction of Hillary Clinton.

Help us find ads, statements, speeches, quotes and figures that don’t quite pass muster. Send your fact-check suggestions: fill out this form, e-mail us or tweet us at @myhlee, @GlennKesslerWP or using #FactCheckThis. Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio round-up.

–Michelle Ye Hee Lee