Reposted from My Substack
Here Rep Tom Tiffany (R-WI) argues that crime in “Democrat Cities with rogue leftist prosecutors” is out of control where they have “demonized and defunded police.”
He claims that 27 of the 30 cities with the highest homicide rate have Democratic Mayors. He doesn’t mention that 37 out of 50 of the largest cities also have Democratic Mayors.
If you go even further to the top 100 Cities — they have Democratic Mayors 63% of the time and have 76% of the population.
Following mayoral elections held in 2023, 76% of the population of the top 100 cities lived in cities with Democratic mayors, and 16% lived in cities with Republican mayors, based on 2020 population estimates.
The twenty largest cities by population had the most Democratic mayors and the fewest Republican mayors:
So when Rep Tiffany complains that most of the cities with the highest murder rates have Democratic mayors… most cities have Democratic Mayors. So that isn’t nearly the flex that he thinks it is.
Trump constantly did the same thing as Tiffany, claiming “Democrat Cities” have all the violent crime.
First of all, over the past year, crime and murder have been coming down.
But the data over the past year has offered a much more optimistic picture. The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent — which would be the biggest national decline on record. The spike that started in 2020 now looks more like a blip, and the murder rate is lower than it was during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The recent data also suggests that the violent-crime rate in 2023 was near its lowest level in more than 50 years, as Jeff Asher, a crime analyst, wrote for his newsletter.
Progressive prosecutors who are attempting to lower jail overcrowding by diversion rather than jail and eliminating the cash bail system have not caused “greater crime.”
In cities across the country, rising violent crime rates have spurred polarized political discourse around what truly keeps Americans safe in their communities. Overall violent crime and homicide rates rose significantly in 2020—increasing by 5 percent and nearly 30 percent, respectively. Despite crime data limitations for 2021, multiple sources report a slowing of these troubling trends. Critics of efforts to reform the broken criminal legal system have capitalized on public fears around rising crime to advance the unfounded claims that progressive prosecutors are to blame. But the evidence simply does not back up these accusations.
A new study led by researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto—in collaboration with researchers from Rutgers University, Temple University, Loyola University of Chicago, and University of Missouri, St. Louis—rebuts claims by media outlets and elected officials that progressive prosecutors have caused crime in cities to rise. This comprehensive analysis finds no evidence linking progressive prosecutors to rising homicide rates in major cities during the coronavirus pandemic or prior to it. As researchers, policymakers, and the general public continue to investigate the causes of rising violent crime in recent years, this study contributes to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that progressive prosecution is not among them.
[...]
These accusations have resulted in backlash against progressive prosecutors across the country. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D) was recalled from office despite broad public support for the policies that he campaigned on in the first place. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren (D) for his policy positions opposing the criminalization of transgender people, even though those positions where not in conflict with any Florida state law. And the Pennsylvania House of Representatives is seeking to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) as a result of rising gun violence in Pennsylvania’s largest city, despite the legislature’s own refusal to strengthen the state’s weak gun laws.
[...]
Researchers pooled and analyzed data reported directly to the Major City Chiefs Association by 65 cities with populations greater than 250,000 in order to examine changes in homicide and robbery across cities with progressive, middle, or traditional prosecutors from 2015 to 2019. The analysis found that:
- Cities with progressive prosecutors were less likely to experience an increase in homicides during the study period and experienced smaller increases in homicides than jurisdictions without progressive prosecutors.
- Cities with progressive prosecutors experienced a 43 percent increase in homicides while traditional and middle prosecutors experienced a 55 percent and 53 percent increase, respectively.
- Fewer cities with progressive prosecutors experienced an increase in homicides than those served by traditional or middle prosecutors.
Further, despite claims that police departments have been “defunded” the fact is that most police departments have had their budgets increase in the last 3 years.
Leaders across the country have blamed the rise in crime on the "defund the police" movement. In most places, it never happened.
In Los Angeles, the county sheriff says local residents are in danger because "defunding has consequences," even though his agency's budget is up more than $250 million.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva is not alone in suggesting to voters that crime is up because Democrats defunded police agencies after nationwide protests of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Politicians, pundits and police leaders across the country are repeating the idea as they address concerns about crime heading toward Election Day.
The truth is, in many communities, defunding never happened.
ABC Owned Television Stations examined the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties and found 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019.
Of the 109 budgets analyzed, only eight agencies cut police funds by more than 2% and 91 agencies increased law enforcement funding by at least 2%.
In 49 cities or counties, police funding has increased by more than 10%.
And for future reference, we can also debunk the “Crime in Democrat cities” by looking at where crime actually happens -— and that’s in Red States.
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The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
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Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9% more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44% more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43% in 2020.
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Altogether, the per capita Red State murder rate was 23% higher than the Blue State murder rate when all 21 years were combined.
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If Blue State murder rates were as high as Red State murder rates, Biden-voting states would have suffered over 45,000 more murders between 2000 and 2020.
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Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.
Also, the gun crime rate in rural areas is higher than in urban areas.
A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts.
Researchers from Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California examined two decades of mortality rates and cause-of-death data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System to compile the study.
A Third Way report found that between 2000 and 2020, Trump-voting states had 12% higher murder rates than did Biden-voting cities.
Data shows that in 2020, eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election in this century.
In the past, Republicans have made crime a major campaign talking point—in October 2022, one quarter of attack ads on Democrats focused on crime, and in the two months leading up to the midterms, Fox aired about 141 crime segments on weekdays, according to the report.
A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine found guns became the leading cause of death for children starting in 2017—motor vehicle-related deaths held the number one spot for 60 years prior.
I’ve had some pushback on the last stat from a MAGA acquaintance. He argues that the Third Way study is flawed based on information he received from the Heritage Foundation.
In a recent report, Jim Kessler and Kylie Murdock of the Third Way think tank claim that “red” states have had higher homicide rates than “blue” states over the past 20 years. This Issue Brief takes a closer look at this question and finds a number of critical flaws in the Third Way report.3
Kylie Murdock and Jim Kessler, “The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem,” Third Way, January 27, 2023, https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem (accessed April 29, 2023). The Third Way also published another report in 2022 on 2020 homicide rates and voting patterns: Kylie Murdock and Jim Kessler, “The Red State Murder Problem,” Third Way, March 15, 2022 https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem (accessed April 29, 2023).
Correcting for these flaws produces the exact opposite conclusion.
The Third Way authors claim that there is a difference between the murder rates in “red” states and “blue” states. Averaging these rates between the years 2014 and 2020 across states that voted for Donald Trump during the 2020 election yields an aggregate homicide rate of 6.48 per 100,000 people, while averaging across states that voted for Joe Biden yields a homicide rate of 4.83 per 100,000 people.
However, drawing conclusions from state-level homicide data in such a manner is flawed, as each state consists of a combination of federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as prosecutors with different approaches to law enforcement often based on highly divergent political beliefs. Violations of state law are prosecuted largely at the county or city level and, thus, amalgamating data across such units neglects important variation in these different approaches.4 [...] Looking at homicide rates by county, states show skewed distributions with many counties having little or no homicides, and a handful of counties with excessively high homicide rates. Thus, state homicide rates can be heavily influenced by a few counties. When those counties have different politics from the rest of the state, it can flip the conclusion about the association between political identifications and homicides.
I would argue that the differences in police and prosecutor tactics and how that affects the crime rate is exactly the difference we want to see? Which strategies are more effective, and which are less effective? Heritage says it’s wrong even to ask that question.
They then never the less continue to make that comparison claiming that they did is “across the same time horizon” — which I’m not sure is different from what Third Way’s methodology — and ipso facto they produce a chart with the opposite results for the counties — which I guess is produced by just removing the “problematic” counties with high crime rates.
But then it has the *Same Result* for the state-by-state comparison. So they debunked the claim while also confirming the claim? Red states are more violent, but that’s because they have blue counties?
Fantastic.
The difference here is that big cities have lots and lots of people. You can have 100 murders in a large town and it doesn’t make a dent statistically because the city has millions of people. But if you have 10 murders in a small town - it makes a big difference because there are only a few thousand people. 100 murders is obviously worse than 10 — but when compared to the local population of millions — 100 deaths = .01% — vs thousands — 10 deaths = 1% — it can be the exact opposite.
As a tie-breaker there is also a report from Axios which uses data from Third Way, but also other sources.
The cities with the highest firearm homicide rates are clustered in the South, generally in red states with less restrictive gun laws, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund provided exclusively to Axios.
Why it matters: The report argues that the findings refute Republican narratives that progressive policies stoke more crime in cities.
- In fact, there's a distinct gap between urban firearm homicide rates in blue states — which tend to have stronger gun safety laws — and those in red states, the report concludes.
- The analysis used data from the Gun Violence Archive on the 300 most populous U.S. cities.
- It comes amid a growing push to treat gun violence as a public health crisis, including New Mexico's controversial use of a public health order to ban open and concealed carry.
What they're saying: The analysis shows "we're really seeing two different Americas when it comes to gun violence," said Chandler Hall, the report's author and a senior policy analyst at CAP.
- "There's already a lot that cities are trying to do to address gun violence locally … but when they're hamstrung by state policies and can't control the flow of guns or how guns are carried in their cities, there's only so much city officials can do," he added.
- What's more, some blue-state cities, like Chicago, are bordered by red states with looser gun laws.
Zoom in: St. Louis had America's highest gun homicide rate in 2022, followed by Birmingham, Ala., New Orleans, Jackson, Miss., and Baltimore.
By the numbers: The average gun homicide rate in blue-state cities was 7.2 per 100,000 residents from 2015 to 2022, the analysis found. In red-state cities, it was 11.1 deaths per 100,000.
The real difference between Rural and Urban death rates isn’t with murder, it’s with gun suicides.
Contrary to popular belief, firearm deaths in the United States are statistically more likely in small towns, not major cities, according to new research. Across the country, gun suicides are more common than gun homicides, and gun suicides are largely responsible for an increase in gun deaths over the past few decades, the study also finds.
The analysis of two decades of U.S. mortality data was conducted by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the University of California, Davis, and appears in the journal JAMA Surgery(link is external and opens in a new window).
“Our study has found that the divide in total intentional firearm deaths between urban and rural counties is increasing, with rural counties bearing more of the burden. In the 2000s, the two most rural county types had statistically more firearm deaths per capita than any other county type, and by the 2010s, the most urban counties—cities—were the safest in terms of intentional firearm death risk,” the authors write.
“Despite the pervasive nature of gun violence, high rates of gun homicide in urban centers have been the sole focus of many policymakers and used as justification to loosen gun laws, when in fact gun violence is an issue in counties of all sizes,” the authors add.
The fact is that the top 10 cities with the greatest violent crime are Albuquerque, Memphis, St. Louis, Vancouver, Oakland, Baltimore, San Francisco, Detroit, Baton Rouge and Anchorage. Most of those are in Red States.
The top 10 cities with the highest murder rates (# per 100k) are St. Louis (66.07), Baltimore (55.77), Detroit (39.80), New Orleans (39.50), Baton Rogue (38.26), Kansas City (30.93), Cleveland (27.77), Memphis (27.73), Newark (27.14) and Cincinnati (23.40).
We don’t get to Chicago (18.26) until #14. We don’t get to Los Angeles (7.01) until #63. We don’t get to San Francisco (6.35) until #66. We don’t get to Portland (3.70) until #78. We don’t get to New York (3.39) until #81.
Even if you look a Democratic cities in Blue States like Chicago, LA and San Francisco — their crime rate is dwarfed by the cities in Red States like St. Louis, Kansas City and New Orleans by an average of 10-20 times. It’s not even close. It’s not even in the same universe.
Lastly, the crime rate for immigrants is a fraction of the rate for citizens.
Crime rates among undocumented immigrants are just a fraction of those of their U.S.-born neighbors, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of Texas arrest and conviction records.
Compared to undocumented immigrants, U.S. citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for violent felonies in Texas from 2012 to 2018, two-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested for felony drug crimes, and over four times more likely to be arrested for felony property crimes, according to a study published by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
So, basically, everything that the GOP claims about crime — is a lie.
Crime is not greater in “Democrat cities" or in Blues States, Rural areas have a higher rate of crime and gun deaths than Urban areas, progressive prosecutors are not fostering crime, the police have not been “defunded”, immigrants are not “more criminal” and overall crime is going down rather than up.
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