Don't Believe Republican Fear Mongering on Crime

To listen to Republicans, not the least Donald Trump, one would believe that America finds itself with surging crime rates and that large cities in blue states are dangerous and crime ridden.  They propose draconian policies that all too often target black and brown citizens and play to the hatreds of the Republican Party base of evangelicals and white supremacists who are best defined by who they hate.  Meanwhile, actual crime data shows that crime rates are falling, crimes involving guns are highest in red states with little or no sensible gun control laws, and that almost all mass shootings are perpetrated by white males, many of whom have been influenced by right wing propaganda and websites. Why the disconnect from reality?  Perhaps two reasons: (i) spreading lies about crime frightens voters to back Republican candidates who promise to be "tough on crime" even as their opposition to gun control makes all of us less safe, and (ii) good news on crime garners less media attention that stories about rape, murder and car jackings with much of the mainstream media which has the attention span of a fruit fly. even as the right wing "news" outlets focus on stories to frighten their viewers.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the real data and underscores the dishonesty of Republican doomsayers.  Here are excerpts:

Rents, average monthly temperatures, grocery prices—most things in American life seem to be rising these days.

But not everything. In 2023, murder rates in the United States dropped at an astonishing rate, probably among the highest on record. That’s according to data gathered by Jeff Asher, an independent criminologist, from cities with publicly available numbers. In the sample of 175 cities, murder is down by an average of almost 13 percent this year.

And it’s not just murder. FBI data for the third quarter show that every category of crime except for motor-vehicle theft is down, some of them sharply, year over year from 2022. (As for the car thefts, they seem—in one of the weirdest data flukes you’ll ever see—to have been driven almost entirely by TikTok videos showing the ease of breaking into certain Kias and Hyundais.) Two years ago, as worries about soaring crime resounded, I wrote that America was in the midst of a violence wave, not a crime wave, as property crime continued to sink even while violent crime rose. Now America seems to be experiencing a peace wave.

“The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years,” Asher wrote in his Substack newsletter.

The drop is unlikely to get the same attention that the increase did. Last month, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who believe that crime in the United States is a very or extremely serious problem has risen sharply, from 54 to 63 percent, since fall 2021, when I noted the violence wave—even as most types of crime have declined over the same period.

The old adage is that if it bleeds, it leads: Lurid stories attract press coverage. More positive stories, such as the absence of crimes, are less likely to receive attention. This is bad news, so to speak, because mistaken impressions about how much crime is going on can lead policy makers and the public to embrace hasty or poorly considered policies, some of them with serious negative side effects. . . . reaction, rather than overreaction, should be the goal. Calibrating that is harder with inaccurate impressions.

“Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist who has studied the perception of crime, told me in 2021. “So crime nationally often looks much worse than it is.”

Dropping crime rates, and the perception (or misperception) of them, could be a factor in next year’s election. During the 2020 election, debates about policing were at the forefront, following the murder of George Floyd. . . . Donald Trump sought to emphasize “law and order”—or, rather, his vision of it—and instill fear in voters. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, some polling indicated that crime fears would badly damage Democratic candidates, though in the end Republicans severely underperformed.

Assuming he is the Republican presidential nominee, Trump is likely to once again run fear-based appeals on crime in 2024 . . . . If crime is not rising, the lack of headlines about rising crime could help Biden, but scanty coverage of falling crime could also limit the president’s gains. One quirk of the data is that Washington, D.C., where much of the press and the political establishment are based, is one of the few cities that has seen murder rise this year.

The drop in 2023 comes atop a 6 percent drop in 2022, according to statistics released by the FBI in October. . . . . Some voices, especially on the left, have hastened to note that even during the worst of the recent bad years, rates still sat below their peaks, in the 1980s. But for the majority of Americans born after 1981, who had seen falling national crime rates and historic lows for most of their lives, this was a jarring reversal.

[T]he specific reasons for the drop are also unclear. Part of it is that the conditions that seem to have led to the rise—including the Floyd protests and the pandemic—have eased. But actions taken by policy makers to quell crime may have also helped.

“There is no single trend that explains why violence might rise or fall in different places—for instance, Philadelphia has seen a sharp drop in violence this year, but a couple hours away is Washington D.C., one of the few cities where violence has risen,”

The exact details of the drop in crime won’t be known for months. The FBI releases its annual report on crime in the fall of the following year. Statistics collated by Asher, by Sharkey’s AmericanViolence.org, and by other groups are the best available and have to stand in for official figures. . . . That said, even without official FBI numbers, the 2023 drop is distinct enough to trust—and celebrate.