There’s been quite a bit of news lately about crime rates in the United States, and fortunately, pretty much all of it has been encouraging. NBC News reported recently, 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.”
Last week, the Justice Department released some preliminary data on this year’s figures, which also showed significant improvements in violent and property crimes in every region of the country. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted soon after that murder rates in 2024 “are on track to be at or below what they were every year of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
Prominent Republicans, however, aren’t just reluctant to celebrate the good news, they’re pretending that it doesn’t exist.
On NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” for example, Rep. Byron Donalds told viewers, “I think it’s important for people to understand your murder rate may be down, but that doesn’t mean that violent crime, et cetera, are also lower.”
But violent crime, et cetera, really are lower. It was a detail the Florida Republican, who’s reportedly in contention for his party’s vice presidential nomination, simply ignored.
Around the same time, Sen. Tim Scott, another leading candidate for the GOP ticket, appeared on ABC News’ “This Week,” and told guest host Jonathan Karl:
“Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades.”
As the South Carolina Republican really ought to know, there’s been no effort to defund law enforcement — except, that is, among Scott’s GOP colleagues in Congress — and the idea that violent crime rates have reached a five-decade high is the opposite of reality.
When Karl noted that crimes are “actually down,” Scott effectively said that he didn’t care about the evidence. “We’ve seen a spike in violent crime,” the senator added, pointing to a development that has not occurred.
The problem is not just that Republicans are lying. The broader significance of this is that many Americans don’t know that they’re lying, and the public has embraced assertions with no basis in reality.
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, including those seeking national office, 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. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found that most Americans have already embraced the falsehoods, evidence be damned. 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.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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