Debate Fact Check: Clinton’s job claims vs. Trump on stop and frisk

FORT MYERS, Fla. – The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on Monday was filled with jabs, accusations and claims of fact.

Some Southwest Florida viewers, like Chad Damitz, said they felt neither candidate were 100 percent honest with voters.

“I felt like both Trump and Clinton were not being completely forthright and truthful,” Damitz said.

Thanks to websites like Politifact, a candidate’s truth-telling is often fact-checked and live-tweeted during debates.

Joshua Gillin, a reporter for PolitiFact Florida, found Trump’s statements on President Barack Obama’s administration doubling the national debt to be half true.

“We can’t ever pin the national debt entirely on a president, however it is accurate that the debt has doubled,” Gillin said.

Clinton used the debate stage to tout her own ideas for economic growth – using her husband’s economic record.

“Manufacturing jobs also went up in the 1990s if we’re actually going to look at the facts,” she said.

However, according to a bureau of labor statistics report regarding jobs by industry from 1989 to 1999, that claim is not true. The report shows job growth in many sectors of the economy, but in manufacturing and in mining, there was a drop during President Bill Clinton’s administration.

A claim by Trump on a controversial New York City police program caught the social media world on fire.

“Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down,” he said.

A NYPD spokesperson quickly took to Twitter to dispute the program’s role in crime prevention, writing that even though the program’s use has decreased dramatically, crime is still down.

Stop question & frisk has decreased nearly 97% in NYC since ’11. Crime, murder, & shootings have decreased significantly during same period

— J. Peter Donald (@JPeterDonald) September 27, 2016

Politifact rated this statement by Hillary Clinton on race and crime to be true:

“And it’s just a fact that if you’re a young African-American man and you do the same thing as a young white man, you are more likely to be arrested, charged, convicted, and incarcerated,” she said.

Using Bureau of Justice statistics for part of their finding, Politifact ruled that research shows Clinton’s claim to widely be accepted as the truth.

If you have a story idea for Lauren Sweeney to investigate, email her at Lauren.sweeney@winknews.com.