The all-vibes politics of crime
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Radley Balko observes that crime went up under Trump and has gone down under Biden. In both cases, this is probably entirely coincidental, but at any rate Republicans have been able to sell a narrative to the media that is the precise inversion of the truth like EMAILS or CARAVANS or EBOLA:
I don’t think presidents have much effect on crime. But it’s fascinating that Trump is the first president in 30 years to oversee a rise in crime. And crime has dropped significantly since he left office. Yet Republicans still attack Biden and Democrats on crime. And it works! pic.twitter.com/DmMzXbkpsF— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) October 16, 2023
And the public has very much internalized the message:
The October 6, 2023 edition of Fox News’ Hannity covered the “ongoing crime wave” that is “wreaking havoc across America” as a result of “the left’s radical policies.” Guest host Pete Hegseth declared that violent crime was “crushing cities and American lives.” Two days earlier, on October 4, Fox News host Martha MacCollum declared that Americans “feel outraged and unsafe.” MacCollum played a clip of an unidentified man saying, “crime is out of control in every city in America.” Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on Fox News on October 2 and laid out a plan to combat “the violent crime wave across this country.” (Ramaswamy wants to keep more people confined to psychiatric institutions.)
NBC News reported in March 2023 that “violent crime is up nationwide and in major cities,” without citing a source. In a Wall Street Journal column published in October 2022, former Attorney General Bill Barr (R) claimed that Democrats “unleashed a crime wave and diminished our sense of safety on the streets.”
Last week, Congresswoman Mary Miller (R-IL) announced she was supporting Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) for House Speaker because he was “the leader our country needs” to combat “a crime wave in our cities.”
With notably rare exceptions, nobody is more concerned with stopping crime than Jim Jordan!
But is there a crime wave in America? Without a doubt, people believe that crime continues to surge. A Gallup poll found that 78% of Americans believe that there was more crime in 2022 than in 2021. (Only 13% believed it declined.)
Comprehensive data for 2022, released by the FBI on Monday, tells a very different story. And preliminary data suggests that 2023 could feature one of the most dramatic declines in violent crime in modern history.
In 2022, homicides were down 6.1%, according to FBI data. The nation’s murder rate, the data shows, was 6.3 per 100,000 people. This figure is below 2020 levels, but slightly higher than 2019. Still, since 1991, the rate of murder has dropped 36%.
Nationwide, the FBI reports that the violent crime rate, including homicide, dropped “an estimated 1.7%” in 2022 compared to the year before. The rate of violent crime is the lowest it has been since 2014, and is nearly half of what it was in 1991 and 1992.
This downward trend, experts say, is expected to continue in 2023. According to crime data from the first half of the year, there is “strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate,” crime analyst Jeff Asher reports. Asher finds that preliminary data indicates that the nation is witnessing the “largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.” Murder, for example, was “down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022.” While Asher acknowledges that these trends could change somewhat, this number is still “astonishing.”
Have I mentioned that Joe Biden is old? And that Afghanistan was six months away from being a stable liberal democracy had only Uncle Joe Brandon not taken away our precious war?