fuzzy math from Rudy

Last night, Howard Nemerov at the Media Research Council's NewsBusters blog reviewed Governor Romney's record on violent crime and found that "the overall [violent] rate dropped 7.8% from 484.9 in 2002 to 447.0 in 2006."  He concludes, "No matter the comparison––total incidents or rates per 100,000 population––Giuliani was wrong to state that Massachusetts saw a violent crime increase while Romney was governor."
 
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/howard-nemerov/2007/11/25/who-s-tougher-crime-romney-or-giuliani
 
And this morning, in an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Mayor Giuliani distorted Governor Romney's record again.  While Mayor Giuliani has apparently recognized his earlier error and dropped any reference to overall violent crime, Mayor Giuliani did claim that "aggravated assault … went up while he was governor." 
 
RUDY GIULIANI: Boston Herald had a big piece on this about two months ago; crime, murder, aggravated assault, burglary all went up while he was governor. In the case of robbery, it went up 12%. And those are all areas in which while I was mayor of New York, those categories went down by 70%. So there's a big difference in his record as a governor, which in the area of these violent crimes was very poor as the Boston Herald pointed out, and my record as mayor was one of the best records from the point of view of safety and security in the country.
 
On the contrary, as the same NewsBusters post points out from FBI data, "aggravated assault decreased 14.8%" during Governor Romney's term.  Just another example of Mayor Giuliani's "fuzzy math."