US crime wave: is it real?

It’s the reality of American politics that reality rarely matters in American politics. A sinkhole could open up on the White House lawn and Democrats would spin it as a new water feature, Republicans as evidence of a portal to Hell. Geologists would be consulted last and least, and the same can be said about statisticians who now find themselves drowned out amid the rhetoric over escalating crime in the United States.

After the recent release of the provisional crime figures for 2019-2020, the debate has intensified as to whether the US is experiencing a “crime wave”. Leading that charge is the familiar figure of the former president. Donald Trump issued an apocalyptic warning last week, insisting that “Crime in our Country is escalating at a pace we’ve never seen before. At the same time, people are pouring through our Borders totally unchecked. Jails in other countries are being emptied out into the United States.”

It benefits the Republicans, of course, to portray Biden as “soft on crime”. It’s one of those issues they leveraged to full effect at the last election after ultra-progressive Democrats presented them with a summer gift in the form of their badly framed calls to “defund the police”. Yet it’s not just Trump and the Republicans who are saying this.

In New York, the fight to become the city’s next mayor has been dominated by the debate around escalating crime. It was certainly no surprise that it was a retired police officer, Eric Adams, who finally won the Democratic race and will now face off against the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, himself a noted New York “crime fighter”. Back in the 1970s, it was Sliwa who formed the “Guardian Angels”, a group of young men and women who patrolled the New York subway in their distinctive red berets, providing unofficial security for New Yorkers thanks to their knowledge of karate and how to make citizen’s arrests.

For the moment, then, Democrats and Republicans are trying to establish competing narratives ahead of the midterms but it already looks like Republicans are winning that battle. A recent poll saw American voters express disapproval of Biden’s handling of crime, by 48 per cent to 38 per cent, even though, in every conceivable sense, Republicans condemning Democrats for crimes committed between 2019 and 2020 (a Republican administration) makes no rational sense. Yet this happens to every president. It’s a commonplace feature of US election cycles that the politics lag quite far behind the reality. Sometimes the numbers work in their favour – such as when Trump took full credit for the Obama/Biden economy – and sometimes it works against them, such as we’re seeing now with Biden facing particular criticism because of last year’s crime figures.

So, what is the reality?

Well, the figures are still preliminary, but they do seem to show the overall crime rate rose by 3 per cent in 2020. Yet in the context of the previous two decades, this still sits well within the year-by-year fluctuations that tend to distract from the overall trend, which has been a decline in crime since its peak in the early 1990s. Indeed, that decline is key. There’s no evidence here to argue that we’re seeing a particularly significant rise in crime. Unless, of course, you want to see a rise.

Where there is a significant rise, however, is around homicides, which saw a 25 per cent increase from 2019 to 2020, but, again, that rise should also be read in the context of the rate being vastly down (about 40 per cent) on what it was during the peak of America’s crime epidemic. This also represents a small fraction of violent crime (albeit one that draws the most attention) and it should also be noted that it doesn’t take a huge number of additional murders to inflate the percentages given that, the smaller the number, the larger any rise appears in percentage terms.

Beyond that, the reason for murder rates rising is too complex to explain in anything but straight political terms. Trump has always made a point of calling out Chicago, led by Democrats, as experiencing a bad crime wave but the murder rate is up across the country, in both cities run by Republicans and Democrats. Murderers still don’t base their crimes on the political affiliation of the mayor of their city or governor of their state. What does appear to contribute, however, is the underlying economic and social health of their surroundings. The demographics of gun crime do appear to map to low opportunity, disadvantaged areas of the country, often with black populations. Also contributing to gun violence is, of course, the availability of guns, where the previous administration rolled back some protections.

Then there was the pandemic, which forced dysfunctional families together and most likely exacerbating already toxic relationships, so they turned deadly. A study published in this month, titled “Firearm purchasing and firearm violence during the coronavirus pandemic in the United States”, reported that: “The pandemic has also exacerbated factors that contribute to interpersonal violence—including financial stress, trauma, and strains on community resources—particularly among Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color […], which already experience a disproportionate burden of interpersonal firearm violence.” Although numbers were up for every month before the pandemic, there was “a large, statistically significant increase” from June to August, with homicides up by 37.2 per cent, and by 28.2 per cent from September to December.

Not that any of this vastly informs the debate. Crime remains one of those few key political issues where perceptions matter more than reality. Whilst most people understand what poor infrastructure or high inflation means for their lives, crime is something still largely viewed through other people’s eyes. PEW Research recently conducted a poll that showed that fear of crime has increased, even as real crime has dropped. It makes it particularly easy for politicians to write their own stories across the headlines.

The reality is that over 74 million voters bought into Trump’s grand strategy based on fear and division. These crime figures do nothing to confirm that he was right but, as with so much about politics, numbers matter less than narrative and the fact we’re talking about it proves that, for the moment, Republicans are winning.