Republican talking points on crime rates run into reality (again)

In recent months, Americans have received quite a bit of information about crime rates in the United States, and fortunately, pretty much all of it has been encouraging. As CNN reported, the news about crime so far this year looks heartening, too.

NBC News has confirmed the release of the data from the FBI.

To be sure, the current calendar year is ongoing, but there’s reason to take the FBI data seriously: It’s not only encouraging, it’s also in line with similar research from the Justice Department and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, both of which published separate findings pointing to reduced crime rates.

If the good news sounds encouraging, it’s not your imagination: It was nearly two weeks ago when the FBI also released more comprehensive data for last year, pointing to lower crime rates — including violent and property crimes — in 2023. NBC News’ report on the FBI’s findings added, “The most serious crimes went down significantly: murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6% — the largest single year decline in two decades — while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.”

The same report added, “Public perception of crime is often out of step with the facts, especially in the age of social media, ease of digital communications between neighbors and doorbell cameras, when Americans may be more aware of individual crimes than they would have been in the past.”

That’s true, but we can also go a step further: Public perceptions are also often wrong because of one of the nation’s two major political parties keeps telling Americans to believe a version of reality that’s wildly at odds with the evidence.

Last week, for example, Donald Trump said anyone who believes the evidence presented by American law enforcement has “a serious brain problem.” A week later, the former Republican president added that crime rates are “through the roof,” adding that “only a stupid person” would accept the evidence as real.

It’s not that the GOP candidate has competing information or raised credible concerns about the process through which the data was collected. Rather, the evidence challenges Trump’s assumptions, which in his mind, necessarily makes the evidence “fake.”

But in Republican politics, the former president is hardly alone. Sen. Tim Scott recently told a national television audience that Americans are confronting “a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades.” The use of the word “literally” was a nice touch, but the South Carolinian was brazenly lying to the public.

Around the same time, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik of New York railed against Biden’s “violent crime crisis.” House Speaker Mike Johnson made similar comments, declaring, “We can’t survive the dramatic increases in violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats’ policies have brought upon our communities.”

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; they could. That said, it’s difficult to have confidence that they will.

Prominent Republican voices likely know that crime rates are falling. That apparently doesn’t 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.

Circling back to our recent coverage, 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 offers a great example of how contemporary Republican politics rejects the intuitive rules for a different model. The evidence makes clear that the Democratic administration has a compelling story to tell: Crime rates, most notably murder rates, spiked toward the end of Trump’s term. Under Biden/Harris, 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 Democrats. 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?”

 This post updates our related earlier coverage.