Stats Don’t Back Up Republicans’ Crime-Wave Rhetoric
Stats Don’t Back Up Republicans’ Crime-Wave Rhetoric
Turns out violent crime was down in 2022, and it’s a lot lower than it was in earlier decades.
All in all, GOP fearmongering about crime parallels the party’s inflation alarms based on selective and outdated numbers. It can be effective, unfortunately; during 2022, Gallup found that 78 percent of Americans thought crime was higher nationally than in 2021. Turns out that just wasn’t the case.
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NATIONAL trends, yes. FTA:
"The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates"
But when you look at local numbers, such as shootings in my home town of Portland:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/portlandpolicebureau/viz/PortlandShootingIncidentStatistics/ShootingIncidentStatisticsJanuary to August shooting numbers:
2019 - 276
2020 - 497
2021 - 850
2022 - 898
2023 - 725If you look at full year numbers:
2019 - 413
2020 - 919
2021 - 1315
2022 - 1309
2023 - 725 (through August)And that's not violent crime in general, that's JUST shootings.
National trends down, but yes, every place is different with different reasons behind the decline. Unfortunately it's quite difficult (albeit not always impossible) to find the covariates responsible for these trends.
You can point to some policy changes, public sentiment, how police are run those years, economic changes due to COVID-19, and so on, but usually it's going to be qualitative evidence at best. There just isn't the multiverse version of Portland where X, Y or Z was slightly different, providing an experimental conditions to test policy and natural experiments only go so far (i.e. Portland compared to other midsized, liberal cities, is still going to ignore a ton of factors).
What makes Portland special after the pandemic? My first instinct is always check what jobs were impacted, but as an outsider, I don't know what Portland has aside from really good coffee and higher than average propensity for handlebar mustaches.
The biggest change is Oregon passed ballot measure 110 in 2020 which took effect Feb. 1 2021, decriminalizing all drugs.
What followed was gangs from Honduras rolling in pushing fentanyl and all the associated violence that comes with that.
It doesn't help that the cops, when faced with actual accountability, just threw up their hands and stopped even the appearance of law enforcement.
Stopped doing traffic stops:
Disbanded the gun taskforce:
Stopped answering 911 calls:
Fewer calls, fewer arrests, more force:
Two of the big open air drug markets are literally blocks from police HQ.
Hmm, looking at the data the rise started a few years before the decriminalization, peaked the year after, and has begun to decline, or at least plateau, again. It seems more like the the financial and societal stress of the pandemic, which took place during the same time, is probably a more likely factor. This happened all over, however things are beginning to decline, which is why the crime wave cries aren't justified. Things are slowing down again after a high seen at the end of a world wide stress factor. We shall see how the next couple years plays out, will it continue to decline, plateau, or rise? Looks like things are moving in the direction of declining again.
The cops being babies probably had some affect on it. How much we wont know for a few years. Other places where the police had similar reactions are now in criminal decline again, after a peak at the end of the pandemic, such as Minneapolis. Seattle seems to still be on a rise, but there are more confounding factors than less police. Also, while a lot of these places had the highest straight numbers of things, the amount of crimes per capita is still significantly lower than in the 80s and early 90s, as the populations of most of the cities, that saw the worst increases, and the US as a whole, has increased greatly since.
But yeah, there are police departments all over the US who are either refusing to do a lot of their job after having regulations on the tightened, or even had their whole departments just quit. This, even though the general amount spent on police has actually been on the rise. The defund the police talking points aren't really holding up due to this and, when you really start looking into the things said by the police, city officials, and communications/paper work filings, about their decline in number, it usually has more to do with them not liking growing transparency rules, less internal control over their investigation and penalties, and reduced protections offered by qualified immunity.