But if the trend in the statistics is correct, then it is a manufactured crisis.

No, it's not. Because what Trump is pushing against and what's measured by the crime statistics are two different things.

Consider the following numbers for Washington, DC:

Residents:            ~700,000 people
Daytime population: ~1,400,000 people
Annual Tourists:   ~25,000,000 people

Most serious crime in DC takes place in the neighborhoods where the permanent residents live and hang out in, and is suffered by those permanent residents. That's the crime that's generally measured by serious crime statistics. That's what those 700K people who live their full time run into.

Meanwhile, there's another 700K people who commute into DC. They're there mostly during daytime hours, they're mostly in the business and downtown districts, and they're mostly in workplaces. And there's another 25 million people who come in as tourists who spend almost all their time in the tourist attractions and immediate environs. Those are places that are not going to be experiencing a lot of the city's crime in any scenario.

The crime statistics measure actual serious crimes that take place mostly in the parts of the city where residents spend their time - and that's what the residents care about. But the largest number of people that experience DC don't go there. They spend their time in different parts of the city. What affects their experience of the city isn't the frequency of actual serious crimes, but the degree to which those areas appear to exhibit a loss of public order or control.

So if the tourist and downtown areas start to look like no one's actually maintaining any order, millions of people will experience that as feeling more unsafe. And that's utterly unrelated to whether the actual serious crimes (which are mostly in other parts of the city) are up or down.