Rhetoric Is Up, But Crime Is Down

Spectator

Donald Trump has nearly made fear-mongering an art form. He announces we’re facing great danger, usually imagined, then finds someone to blame for it and declares himself the only solution.

You might recall his announcement speech before he ran in 2016, with ugly assertions that illegal immigrants were being “sent” and included rapists and murderers so we must fear them. Then he banned travel from several Muslim countries because he equates Muslims with terrorists and wants us to do the same. Our big cities, he claimed, were more dangerous than Afghanistan.

Apparently he didn’t do much to improve things in his four years as president because he’s replaying that same big-cities-are-more-dangerous-than-Afghanistan song. At a campaign rally in New Hampshire he specifically mentioned Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles and described them as “terrible.”

(There is something interesting about the cities Trump singles out as terrible—they are all in states he lost and they all have large populations of minorities. It’s not likely a coincidence.)

Trump’s nonstop, multi-year drumbeat claiming the crime sky is falling—and the right-wing media who regurgitate his every negative comment—must be working, because according to a Gallup Poll in December, 77 percent of the country believes crime is getting worse.

The problem is both Trump and his fear-mongering allies are wrong.

Local police departments keep track of crimes, and the FBI keeps track of those statistics. According to that FBI data, violent crime—they consider the four categories of violent crime to be murder, rape, robbery/aggravated assault, and non-negligent manslaughter—was down 1.7 percent in 2022 from 2021. Even better, the third quarter statistics for 2023, the last period for which they have complete data, showed violent crime was down another 8 percent nationally and property crime was down more than 6 percent. Here’s the real kicker and what pleasantly surprises many: Big city murder rates are way, way down.

Every year, ABC News surveys 180 cities, and that data indicates murder rates have dropped by historic rates in seven of our 10 biggest cities. How big a drop from 2022 to 2023? Down 25 percent in both New Orleans and Baltimore, down 18 percent in Atlanta, down 15 percent in Miami, down 13 percent in Chicago, and down 11 percent in New York City.

According to detroitmi.gov, our biggest city was part of the trend, reporting the fewest homicides, 253, since 1966, a 16 percent reduction in non-fatal shootings, and a 34 percent reduction in carjackings.

As reported by NBC News, Jeff Asher, a former crime analyst for the CIA and New Orleans Police Department and founder of AH Datalystics, said, “It is historic. It’s the largest one year decline. It’s cities of every size. It’s the suburbs, it’s rural counties, tiny cities, it’s large cities, it’s really a national decline.” Asher believes approximately 2,000 fewer people were murdered in 2023 than in 2022.

The country also realized comparable reductions in robbery and aggravated assaults. Almost every crime category saw reductions from 2021 to 2022 and more still in 2023.

That doesn’t sound more dangerous than Afghanistan. In fact, we are now safer than we have been in some time, Donald Trump’s false claims notwithstanding.

Some of this hysteria over crime was perpetuated by communities talking about defunding the police after the murder of George Floyd. GOP Rep. Jim Jordan likes to talk about “21 cities that defunded their police departments by more than $1 billion.”

But according to PolitiFact, at least 14 of those cities reversed course and actually increased funding for police, and the other seven simply reallocated money to other law enforcement programs.

(Note: Statistics for rape are a lot trickier. Rapes aren’t always reported in the year they occur and different organizations have different data sets. Statista says there were 475,000 reported rapes in 2022, but only about 38 percent of rapes were actually reported. The New York office of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which keeps track of such things, puts the number at 675,000 and says only 20 percent are reported, with 19 percent of those reports resulting in arrests and convictions. Most organizations seem to agree less than 10 percent of reported rapes result from false allegations.)

There was one area of violence that did not improve at all. According to the Fraternal Order of Police, 378 law enforcement officers, from departments large and small, were shot in the line of duty last year, an all-time record. At least 46 of those officers died.

It’s good news we’re now safer than we’ve been in many years. But it’s not good news at all that those serving and protecting us are more at risk than ever.

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