Why would San Francisco recall the District Attorney? Why would other progressive prosecutors be threatened by recalls? Are these California voters losing their minds? The problems with prosecutors aren't real? These recall battles tend to be settled between progressive Democrats and moderate Democrats. There's no Fox News or conservative voices instigating dissent.
The Biden Administration has had to distance itself from the more progressive elements in the party when it came to law & order. "The White House's recently announced "fund the police" measure confirms that President Joe Biden’s administration will not pursue the kind of transformative criminal justice reform many voters supported during his candidacy, despite his previous rhetoric." This initiative was opportunistically announced just prior to last year's midterm elections. I'm glad Biden showed some flexibility and ignored the progressive base, but that doesn't mean that's where urban Democratic strongholds are on the issue.
Since you want stats, how bout the stats cited in these articles. In the Chicago article, the new Mayor admits crime in Chicago is bad. By the way, U.S. homocides jumped over 28% in 2020 from 2019. They have not subsided.
You can glibly say Democrats want to control crime, but how they get there is held hostage by ineffective, progressive policies. Yeah, who doesn't want to control crime, but what you do about it matters.
Except you generalize because you dislike the Dems.
Americans elect DA's - which is bizarre, but Americans elect judges as well and that's even stranger. As I understand it, a DA with some unusual and utopian ideas was elected in San Francisco and then recalled. And that has caused months of finger-pointing wherein GOP supporters claim that the Dem Party is - ohmigosh!!!! - "soft on crime".
And the evidence for this is the SF DA's recall, some video footage of homelessness and drug use in some west coast cities and the mayor of Chicago saying "crime is bad". That's a pretty weak case. Of course, our buddy Mitch has seized on a policy wherein employees of a retail chain are forbidden to arrest shoplifters - even brazen ones - as evidence of "the woke mind virus". It's been pointed out to Mitch many, many times that the policy is dictated by the store's liability insurer and not "wokeness". But Mitch is Mitch and doesn't really register this explanation.
As you point out, Dem policy is firmly pro law enforcement and pro police, as it should be. There are individuals who have utopian ideas. There are even houses near mine in downtown Toronto that advocate letting homeless people take over our local parks. But almost everyone supported the cops when they broke up tent cities and evicted the dwellers shortly after COVID measures ended. But individuals do not make a policy any more than neo nazis are typical Republican voters.
If you have "proof" -
- that the Dem "base" is anti law enforcement, please post it. I'll wait.
But I suspect that - as usual - you just like posting silly bullshit GOP talking points and pretending that they're actual real facts. But this IS a real fact. NYC has a lower homicide rate than those nice, well run GOP cities in Florida. (See below). But then, the GOP base only likes the cops when they're arresting Black and Brown people, right?
Good morning. We’re covering Republican claims about crime — plus Hurricane Idalia, Mitch McConnell and Korean fine dining. |
| A prayer vigil in Florida after the Jacksonville shooting.Malcolm Jackson for The New York Times |
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Republican politicians often treat it as an established fact: Where they are in power, crime is low. Where Democrats are in power, crime is high. |
“Republican-run cities are doing very nicely because they arrest people when you have crimes,” Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson last week. |
“The cities and these left-wing states allowing criminals to run wild on our streets, that doesn’t work,” Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, said in March, citing New York in particular. |
But party rule does not drive crime. Consider DeSantis’s state, Florida. Its homicide rate was roughly 50 percent higher than New York’s in 2021. Florida’s two most populous cities, Jacksonville and Miami, each had a homicide rate more than double New York City’s last year, even though both had Republican mayors. |
This is not to say Republican leadership leads to more crime. You can find examples of blue states and cities doing worse than Florida, and of other red states and cities doing better. Looking at all the data, it is hard to make much of any connection between political partisanship and crime. To put it another way, prominent Republicans are misrepresenting the country’s crime problem. |
The Republican claim is rooted in a real pattern. Big cities generally have higher crime rates than rural and suburban areas, thanks to their density and other factors. Democrats run most big cities because urban areas tend to contain more liberal voters. So when looking at the places with the most murders, you’ll often find Democratic-run cities. But that is not the whole story. |
Take the 20 largest U.S. cities. The 16 run by Democratic mayors had 12.3 murders for every 100,000 people. The three Republican-run cities — Jacksonville, Fort Worth and Oklahoma City — had a rate of 11.4. There is a difference, but it is small. (I’m focused on murders because the data for them is more reliable than for other crimes, which go underreported.) |
Those rates mask a lot of variation. In a ranked list of murders for all 20 cities, the three Republican-run cities fall around the middle. Some blue cities — such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle — have roughly half the murder rates as their red counterparts, while the rates in other blue cities, like Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Chicago, are two to three times as high. |
That variation is the point: Whether a big city is run by Democrats or Republicans has little influence on its murder rate. |
The same is true at the state level for homicides, as this map by my colleague Ashley Wu shows: |
| Source: C.D.C. | Data is from 2021. | By The New York Times |
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Once again, it’s hard to see a strong link between party rule and killings. The four deadliest states are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico. Two have Democratic governors, and two have Republican governors. Some red states look bad, and some look good. The same is true for blue states. |
So what drives higher crime rates? The state map offers a few answers. Rural areas tend to have lower crime and murder rates. (But when murders surged and then fell across the U.S. starting in 2020, rural places experienced a similar pattern.) Poverty and race play a role, both of which are historically linked to violence in cities. |
Access to guns is another major factor, particularly for murders. Guns make any conflict more likely to escalate into deadly violence, and they can embolden criminals. On this issue, there is a partisan divide — Democrats are more comfortable regulating firearms — and that could help explain higher levels of violence in Republican states, especially in the South. It can also explain violence in cities, which get a lot of guns from Southern states with laxer laws. |
There are many more variables. It is a point that this newsletter has made before: Crime is a complicated issue, touching on personal disputes, the economy, social services and, really, almost every other aspect of society. Only a few factors are significant enough to make a big difference by themselves — and partisanship is not one of them. |
Related: Tennessee held a special legislative session on gun violence after a mass shooting at a Nashville school. Lawmakers enacted no major policy changes. |
