The Good News About Crime is Bad News for Some

I realize the headline sounds a lot like a contradiction but it isn’t. Crime has been plummeting for decades and 2023 stats, and data to date for 2024, show massive declines as well. That’s good news if you are actually looking at crime statistics, but it’s bad news for the media and conservatives — especially Trumpist authoritarians.

The media hypes bad news because the public eats it up. Republicans hype bad news — even if they have to make it up — in order to panic the herd and get them stampeding senselessly in the Trump direction. This combination of power seeking for Republicans and profit seeking for the media means the typical American believes myths and lies. At best they typically exaggerate the problem.

In December NBC reported on crime last year:

Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.

A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.

The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.

The latest data from the FBI is even more dramatic. They report that for the first quarter of 2024 crime rates fell even more steeply from those in 2023. According to a FBI press release data shows “violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.”

When it came to various property crimes CNN reported the data showed steep declines.

“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.”

“Compared to the first five months of 2023, murders this year have dropped more than 40% in cities including New Orleans, Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, according to the research firm AH Datalytics, which analyzes crime figures reported by law enforcement agencies across the nation.

Although more than six months still remain in 2024, “‘it’s plausible that this will be, by far, the largest one-year decline in American history,’ said Jeff Asher, criminal justice analyst and co-founder of consulting firm AH Datalytics.”

Also contrary to popular Republican mythology is where crime is worse. You’d think from their rhetoric it would be godless New England or the North but in reality the most crime-ridden states are in the Bible Belt, for the most part — what the GOP calls their “base.”

According to Statista the 5 states with the highest violent crime rates in 2022 were New Mexico, Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee while the 5 with the lowers rates of violent crime were Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Wyoming. So four of the five most violent states were GOP controlled while of those with the lowest rates of violent crime only one was, and it’s the least populated state we have. It’s easy to have low crime rates if no one lives there.

Statista also reported the homicide rate in 2022 was 6.3 per 100,000 population for the country as a whole.

Now the most serious crime is homicide. It’s one thing to have you wallet taken and quite another to have you life taken. Homicide rates started going up in the 60s due to the population boom and the higher prevalence of young males — the demographic most likely to commit violent crime. Here are the rates for select years but it shows the general trend, according to the data from the Disaster Center.

1960 5.1
1970 7.9
1980 10.2
1990 9.4
1995 8.2
2000 5.5
2005 5.6
2010 4.8
2015 4.9
2020 7.8
2023 5.5

In 2019 and 2020, during the Pandemic and the last years of Trump, homicide rates jumped. Pew Research reports there were 7.8 homicides for every 100,000 people in 2020. But they quickly returned to their long-term pattern of declining year after year. Deseret News reported 2023 national homicide rates were down to 5.5 and “2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years.”

According to the FBI data homicides in the U.S. are down 26.4% when comparing 2024 to 2023 for the first quarter. If that holds true for the year we could end the year with a homicide rate down near the 4.0 level. If that proves to be the case it will be the lowest national homicide rate since around 1908. That may be optimistic but it’s not unrealistic either.

I also looked at the crime rates in the largest city run by Republican, Dallas, to the larges city run by Democrats, New York. In 2023 Dallas had 246 homicides with a population of 1.3 million, which is a homicide rate of 18.93 per 100,000 population. New York City—where Republicans pretend crime is rampant unlike the safe enclave of Dallas—had 391 homicides in 2023 but in a city with a population of 8.34 million, which gives it a homicide rate of 4.68 making the largest GOP run city almost 4 times more deadly than the largest under Democratic governance.

All this is good news for the country and it’s good news crime rates have been improving for the last 30 years in spite of GOP protestation to the contrary. The problem remains bad news gets the attention of the populace and then they seem to think the exceptional that is report is the ordinary. Add to that the GOP dishonesty about crime in general and it means a lot of people would think good news contrary that is contrary to popular perception is the problem.

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