I personally think the crime panic in cities is based upon the sense of chaos around homelessness on the streets and in rural areas around the fear mongering in right wing media. Pew did some polling on the issue:
Around six-in-ten registered voters (61%) say violent crime is very important when making their decision about who to vote for in this year’s congressional elections. Violent crime ranks alongside energy policy and health care in perceived importance as a midterm issue, but far below the economy, according to the Center’s October survey.
Republican voters are much more likely than Democratic voters to see violent crime as a key voting issue this year. Roughly three-quarters of Republican and GOP-leaning registered voters (73%) say violent crime is very important to their vote, compared with around half of Democratic or Democratic-leaning registered voters (49%).
Conservative Republican voters are especially focused on the issue: About eight-in-ten (77%) see violent crime as very important to their vote, compared with 63% of moderate or liberal Republican voters, 65% of moderate or conservative Democratic voters and only about a third of liberal Democratic voters (34%).
Older voters are far more likely than younger ones to see violent crime as a key election issue. Three-quarters of registered voters ages 65 and older say violent crime is a very important voting issue for them this year, compared with fewer than half of voters under 30 (44%).
There are other demographic differences, too. When it comes to education, for example, voters without a college degree are substantially more likely than voters who have graduated from college to say violent crime is very important to their midterm vote.
Black voters are particularly likely to say violent crime is a very important midterm issue. Black Americans have consistently been more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to express concern about violent crime, and that remains the case this year.
Some 81% of Black registered voters say violent crime is very important to their midterm vote, compared with 65% of Hispanic and 56% of White voters. (There were not enough Asian American voters in the Center’s survey to analyze independently.)
Differences by race are especially pronounced among Democratic registered voters. While 82% of Black Democratic voters say violent crime is very important to their vote this year, only a third of White Democratic voters say the same.
Kicker:
Annual government surveys from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show no recent increase in the U.S. violent crime rate. In 2021, the most recent year with available data, there were 16.5 violent crimes for every 1,000 Americans ages 12 and older. That was statistically unchanged from the year before, below pre-pandemic levels and far below the rates recorded in the 1990s, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey.
For each of the four violent crime types tracked in the survey – simple assault, aggravated assault, robbery and rape/sexual assault – there was no statistically significant increase either in 2020 or 2021.
The National Crime Victimization Survey is fielded each year among approximately 240,000 Americans ages 12 and older and asks them to describe any recent experiences they have had with crime. The survey counts threatened, attempted and completed crimes, whether or not they were reported to police. Notably, it does not track the most serious form of violent crime, murder, because it is based on interviews with surviving crime victims.
The FBI also estimates that there was no increase in the violent crime rate in 2021. The other major government study of crime in the U.S., the National Incident-Based Reporting System from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, uses a different methodology from the BJS survey and only tracks crimes that are reported to police.
The most recent version of the FBI study shows no rise in the national violent crime rate between 2020 and 2021. That said, there is considerable uncertainty around the FBI’s figures for 2021 because of a transition to a new data collection system. The FBI reported an increase in the violent crime rate between 2019 and 2020, when the previous data collection system was still in place.
The FBI estimates the violent crime rate by tracking four offenses that only partly overlap with those tracked by the National Crime Victimization Survey: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault and robbery. It relies on data voluntarily submitted by thousands of local police departments, but many law enforcement agencies do not participate.
In the latest FBI study, around four-in-ten police departments – including large ones such as the New York Police Department – did not submit data, so the FBI estimated data for those areas. The high nonparticipation rate is at least partly due to the new reporting system, which asks local police departments to submit far more information about each crime than in the past. The new reporting system also makes it difficult to compare recent data with data from past years.
The murder rate rose sharply during the first year of the pandemic (when Donald Trump was president, btw) but has leveled off. As Pew points out, it is still way below what it was in the past.
I think NextDoor.com is contributing to the problem. If you read the one from my neighborhood you’d think we live in Mad Max Thunderdome. (We don’t.) And it’s true that the homeless situation in LA is terrible, property crimes are up and there’s a lingering sense of chaos in some neighborhoods from both the pandemic and the protests in the summer of 2020. (Plywood has only recently come off of a lot of windows that went up after the mass looting that took place.) It’s been a crazy time. The country is suffering from mass PTSD and I’m not sure that politics is the path to solving that.
However, there is only one party that’s seeking to exacerbate these feeling, profit from them and seize power with false promises to “fix” everything. Now why anyone would look to Trump, who was in charge when everything went to hell, I don’t know. But he talks a tough game so I guess that’s all they want.