Republican-Controlled States Have Their Share of High Crime Rates
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
There seems to be a great local, statewide and national debate regarding the connection between crime and politics. Each political party claims to have the greatest concern for the safety of their people, even though the Republicans are often portrayed as the “law and order” party, while Democrats are seen as soft on crime.
Personally, I believe that both parties have a firm belief and intention to do the right thing for their constituency. For the sake of this letter, I’d like to dig a little deeper into the correlation between political ideology and crime prevention.
But first, a little good news for New Yorkers. The NYPD just released statistics showing that murders and violent crimes in August 2022 were less than last year’s rate, with reductions of shootings by 19 percent and murders by 13 percent. In addition, New York State ranked 41st for annual crime rate in 2020, and the FBI reports for 2022 a similar standing. That’s right, New York has a lower crime rate than 82 percent of the states. So how does this fit into the partisan dialogue?
To answer this question, I looked at the states with the 25 highest crime rates in 2020 and characterized them as, Republican controlled, Democratic controlled and divided control government. This is based on which party held the governor’s office and the majority of seats in both houses of the legislature. Remarkably, counter to what we are being told by many office-seekers, the findings are that 14 of these states were totally controlled by Republicans, eight were controlled by Democrats and three were under divided control.
So, I welcome different perspectives on whether the U.S. crime problem is the responsibility of any one political affiliation. But please base your arguments on facts and statistics rather than on anecdotal evidence. Conspiracy theorists may doubt the veracity of the statistics, claiming that they are manipulated by the “liberal deep state.”
While you are at it, also try to explain why the U.S. has a higher crime rate than 59 percent of all the nations in the world. Of all the developed western nations our crime rate is only surpassed by France. Could it be the proliferation of guns in our nation?
Melvyn R Tanzman
Mohegan Lake
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