Crime Isn't a Partisan Issue
One message that voters keep hearing over and over and over is that crime is out of control in Joe Biden’s America, so everyone needs to vote for Republicans or else the scary people will kick down your door and mutilate you. If you subscribe to this newsletter you are probably someone who likes nuance and likes to think carefully about things, so it won’t come as a surprise to you when I say there is a lot more to the story.
Before I get started, you should know that there are two primary resources for nationwide crime data. There is the Uniform Crime Reporting System at the FBI, and the National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. I’ll be using both of these because both primary sources show pretty much the same thing even when they are asking different questions.
Republican candidates want you to believe that crime looks like this.
This is the FBI’s data for all violent crimes. Here is the data for murders.
Pretty scary, right? And crime does look like that—that is authentic and authoritative data.
But the first rule for graphs, as Jason Chaffetz knows, is to pay close attention to the Y axis. Both of these look like they are showing enormous spikes in crime. Totally out of control…right?
Well, let me show you the exact same graphs.
Makes quite a big difference when you get to see more of the picture, doesn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong here, any increase in crime is not a good thing, but reality is much, much different than Fox News would like you to believe.
The truth is that crime isn’t an issue that can be placed at the feet of one party. An astute lefty could look at the two full picture graphs and say the following: “Crime was at its peak in the Reagan and Bush 41 years, then fell drastically in the Clinton years. Bush 43 didn’t see any decrease in crime, and Obama lowered crime for the first 6 years he was president, before it went back up, but not as high as Bush levels. Then Trump became president and crime exploded.” Guess what, that lefty would be 100% correct about all of that. These graphs do actually look like Democrats are far better at reducing crime.
But I say ‘look like’ because crime isn’t an issue that can be easily fit into a partisan bucket, and attempts to do so are usually clubfooted.
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I’ll give you an example: in 2020 during the protests, we saw a lot of right wing messaging to the effect of “this is what Joe Biden’s America looks like.” You know what was odd about that message? Trump was president.
To try to deflect the issue of crime the right had to make the argument that the sitting president had nothing to do with it, but the guy who had never been president gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up.
And that brings us to the second thing you will probably notice about those graphs. The FBI data only goes to 2020—a year in which Trump was president for all 12 months.
An honest person would look at these graphs and say the current crime surge probably started in 2015 or 2016—both years when Barack Obama was president for all 12 months. This is because, Paul Pelosi aside, crime has nothing to do with partisan politics (fingers crossed that political violence doesn’t begin to become the norm).
Want more proof? Here are a bunch of charts on violent crime and property crime in the US—with more of the picture than partisans want you to have.
First, the BJS graph that matches the FBI violent crime graph above. These BJS graphs do have 2021 data—a year in which Joe Biden was president for 11 months.
Rape, from the FBI and BJS
Robbery, from the FBI and BJS
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Aggravated Assault from the FBI and the BJS
Property (nonviolent) crime, from the FBI and BJS
Hopefully you get the point by now that none of these show any particular trend of one party being better on crime than another. The decision to commit a crime is something that interacts with income, socioeconomic status, personality, mental health, stress, and long term life prospects—not who is president.
I’ll leave you with one final datapoint. There are many ways to measure what the most dangerous and safest cities in the United States are. Quibble with this one if you’d like, but I think any reasonable metric would give you a similar outcome across partisan spread. What is that outcome? Four of the ten most dangerous cities are led by Republicans or people who have clearly been Republican before the non-partisan mayor’s election: Anchorage, Alaska; Bakersfield, California; Lubbock, Texas; and Springfield, Missouri. Even in the hated bastion of progressivism called California, Bakersfield is “sinking” far faster than liberal led cities.
Now look at the safest cities. Even the loony lefty places like Boston, Cambridge, Green Bay, and Warren all make the cut. This is because crime isn’t a partisan issue. Anyone who votes for someone because of crime, and that someone doesn’t have a detailed plan for how to address crime, will be disappointed because a D or an R next to a name is not going to change crime trends.
Yes, crime matters. Any increase in crime is a concern—I’m not downplaying that. But the data is clear that Joe Biden and Democrats are not the cause of the current crime increase, and voting for Republicans won’t fix it. A cynical person might even argue that a Republican controlled Congress would want more crime to further weaken Biden’s/Democrat’s position for the 2024 presidential election.
Crime might be getting worse, but we’re far from armageddon. Don’t buy any argument that says otherwise.
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