There’s no great mystery as to why so many Americans believe crime rates are getting worse: That’s precisely what Republicans keep telling the public to believe.
A couple of months ago, for example, Rep. Nancy Mace released a video online presenting a rather scary vision of modern life in the United States. The South Carolina Republican’s video was accompanied by straightforward text: “Since Joe Biden took office, crime has skyrocketed across our country.”
That was not, and is not, true. In fact, CNN reported this week on new statistics from the FBI showing a 15% drop in violent crime in the early months of 2024.
The new numbers show violent crime from January to March dropped 15.2% compared to the same period in 2023, while murders fell 26.4% and reported rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased during that period when compared to last year by 12.5%, according to the data, while robberies fell 17.8%. … Meanwhile, property crime went down 15.1% in the first three months of this year. Burglaries dropped 16.7%, while motor vehicle theft decreased by 17.3%. The declines in violent and property crimes were seen in every region of the US.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a written statement that the latest data “makes clear that last year’s historic decline in violent crime is continuing.”
The reference to last year was especially notable because of the encouraging results from 2023. NBC News reported in March, for example, “that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising.”
All of this, of course, follows a dramatic spike in the murder rate in 2020 — the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency.
As for the political implications of the recent progress, I’m reminded anew of a line in a recent Axios report that stood out for me: “Polls show crime is a top concern ahead of the 2024 election — and it’s an issue where Republicans regularly edge Democrats. But falling homicide rates could take the steam out of the crucial GOP advantage.”
That’s true; it could. That said, it’s difficult to have confidence that it will.
Prominent Republican voices likely know that crime rates are falling. That does not appear to stop them from telling the public the opposite of the truth, working from the assumption that many voters will simply believe the falsehoods and never hear about actual crime data.
In the abstract, political campaigns have long followed some intuitive rules. Those looking to win tend to identify rivals’ areas of weakness and focus attention accordingly. Similarly, candidates have also taken care to learn about their foes’ strengths and steer their races away from those issues.
But crime rates offer a great example of how contemporary Republican politics rejects the intuitive rules for a different model. To the extent that reality still has meaning, Biden has a compelling story to tell: Crime rates, most notably murder rates, spiked toward the end of his Republican predecessor’s term. Under the incumbent Democratic president’s leadership, Americans are now safer.
Common sense might suggest that GOP officials would see the news and try to move the public conversation away from this area of strength for Biden. But as it turns out, they find it far easier to effectively say, “Why don’t we just make stuff up and wait for the public to buy it?”
Yes, the evidence could pose a problem for Republicans as the election season advances, but given the party’s shamelessness, cynicism and complete indifference toward the data, it seems likely that too many GOP voices will simply disregard the proof and keep lying.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
