Despite the homily about “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” crime data tells the real story.
“On the one hand, it is accurate that the murder rate in the U.S. has gone up at an alarming rate. On the other hand, despite the right-wing media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states more than Democratic areas,” Yahoo News said (here) on June 15, 2022.
In the Oklahoma governor’s debate on October 19, the GOP incumbent laughed at his Democratic opponent (watch video here) when she pointed out that state has a higher murder rate than New York or California, but she’s actually right (see fact-check here).
Two recent studies found homicides have “increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors” and “no meaningful differences” in larceny and robbery trends, and much higher per capita murder rates “in states that voted for Donald Trump” with the highest rates in states that “voted Republican in every presidential election in this century,” the Atlantic reported (here) on October 20, 2022 (see CDC state-by-state interactive map here).
Republicans talk a fast game, but they’re not actually better at preventing crime; the statistics argue they’re worse. Read story here.
But why? The New York Post, a Murdoch-owned conservative-leaning newspaper (the Murdoch family, if you don’t know, owns the notoriously rightwing network Fox News), claims red-state crime is concentrated in “big cities” run by Democratic mayors (see article here).
But that’s true of blue states, too, which generally speaking have even bigger cities. So why would blue states have overall lower violent crime rates than red states because of “Democratic cities,” when blue states have more and bigger “Democratic cities”? That doesn’t add up.
The more likely explanation is that higher crime rates correlate with lower education and more poverty, both of which are more prevalent in red states. As Public Radio Tulsa pointed out (in the fact-check link above), Oklahoma’s elevated crime rate is longstanding, which suggests it’s due to structural societal factors like these.
Crime rates also ebb and flow, tending to be higher during times of a larger youth population, as crime is youthful to a considerable extent. In the old days, newspapers ginned up “crime waves” to sell newspapers during slow news periods; why wouldn’t politicians, especially those lacking good issues to campaign on, do the same thing?