Regional
While Trump is busy harassing cities like New York and Washington, let’s read up on murder stats in states like Mississippi and Alabama.
House Republicans held three field hearings on violent crime last year in New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC. These hearings should have been held in the murder-plagued states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. In 2023, Speaker Johnson’s hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana had a murder rate 8 times higher (41.1) than Minority Leader Jeffries’ hometown of Brooklyn, New York (5.0), 6 times higher than Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, California (6.6), and more than 7 times higher than the national average (5.5). Our 2023 report in the Red State Murder Problem series found that murder rates were significantly higher in red states than blue states every year from 2000 to 2020. Over these 21 years, the red state murder rate was 23% higher than the blue state murder rate. Our analysis of the latest CDC data found that 2021 and 2022 were no exception.
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We found that murder rates were down 5% nationwide in 2022, but a red state murder gap still persists. Murder rates in red states were 33% higher than in blue states in both 2021 and 2022. As in 2019 and 2020, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama hold the first, second, and third highest murder rates in the country, respectively.
Gee, what might those three states have in common?
Could it possibly be that they were and are the three deepest Deep South states, with the most profound entanglement with slavery and Jim Crow and murderous resistance to the Civil Rights movement? Could it be that the murders of Emmett Till and James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner still hang over the region like a miasma?
There is a problem with using total number of murders as proof for saying an entire state is violent because it is a red state.
The city of Jackson, Mississippi has a high murder rate, and it is a blue city. New Orleans, Louisiana has high murder rate, and it is a blue city. Tuskegee and Birmingham have the highest murder rates in Alabama and those are blue cities. A state can be mostly red in the rural areas and those rural areas generally have low murder rates. Major cities have much higher murder rates so simply using the total number of murders should not be used to say the whole state is riddled with violence.
Not trying to defend Trump or his minions here. Just pointing out that most of the murders in the USA are from the city areas and most of those cities are not run by Republicans. Crime rates are very different in big cities versus small towns and rural areas in the USA.
Southwest, I think it’s more complex than that. All the red state cities may be more liberal than the rural areas (except Oklahoma City – that is DEFINITELY an exception!), but the cities are not the ones in charge of state crimes. The crimes listed are state, not local. I live in a blue city in a red state, and the homelessness is some of the worst I’ve seen lately. The crime stats are better, probably, than a lot of cities, but Lincoln isn’t a large city, it’s more of a mid-size city. We have a Democrat for mayor, many of our city council are liberal (or moderate) Democrats, but they are taking care of things like roads, schools, etc. Other than local ordinances, crime tends to be on a state level.
And on the state level, they are ripping away the tattered shreds of what remains of the social safety net, all in the name of giving rich folks a tax break. No property taxes, no, we don’t want that, we want to tax food instead (right now we don’t tax food).
The conditions that give rise to increased crime rise from the actions of the state legislators. These are often felt in the cities first, because that is where the bulk of the population is. Coming from a small city, it can be a shock to see the level of homelessness, but I was not one of the ones in Hastings who was unaware of the homeless there. Plus, soup kitchens, school lunch programs, and homeless shelters are better able to deal with the problem in the smaller areas, and in the rural areas, most of the people are either rich or they are living off subsistence farming. I know; I’ve lived in poverty, and we were able to eat most of the time because my dad had land where he could plant.
The situations are different in the city. Homelessness is dire, because when jobs go away there is nothing to turn to. If unemployment runs out, you have few options. If welfare benefits are shredded (like they were in the 90s, with Bill Clinton’s ‘reform’), you don’t have anything to fall back on. If Medicaid is slashed, you can’t get medical care. If food stamps are cut, you can’t buy food. All these things are more likely to affect people in cities because people in cities may not know each other, may not have any family in the area who can take care of them, etc. In smaller cities, where most people know a large part of the population, there is a better social safety net outside of the government. This helps reduce crime, because people might have less need. (I am not denying the need in smaller cities and rural areas; I’ve seen it. I am simply pointing out that cities may have more resources, but the number of people needing those resources quickly overwhelm the system.)
All this is the result of STATE policies, not local. Crime rate is highly tied to demographics. Cities are more likely to have larger numbers of young males, the demographic that commits most of the crimes. They are more likely to have large pockets of unmitigated poverty, which leads to higher crime rates. So yeah, the red state cities run by Democrats have higher crime rates than the rural areas, but they are where they are because of the Republicans in their legislature.