RNC Speakers Continue To Lie About Violent Crime Rising While Data Says Crime Has Done Nothing But Fall

Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty

Violent crime in America has virtually done nothing but decline since the early 1990s, and crime analysts report that U.S. crime, in general, is currently at a 50-year low. But Republicans continue to ignore the explicitly clear databases of the FBI and local law enforcement agencies —the same databases where they get the Black-on-Black crime statistics they intentionally misinterpret in the most racist ways possible—so they can keep hammering away at the same stale false narrative that crime, especially in the Black community, is rising under Democratic leadership faster than Trump rose for a power fist-appropriating photo-op immediately after getting shot at. 

Which is why in today’s episode of All MAGA Republicans Do Is Lie And Sell Bibles, the focus is on last night’s speeches on day two of the  Republican National Convention. It was as predictable as the first night was. Speakers continued to dog whistle about crime rising in America without citing any statistical evidence that crime is, in fact, rising in America, which they could not do because no such statistical evidence exists. (Spoiler alert: the data says the opposite of what the GOP says, per usual.)

Mourners and protesters gather after police shoot unhoused man who was near the RNC Source: Jim Vondruska / Getty

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed the policies of the Democratic party have brought communities “dramatic increases” in “violence, crime and drugs.” House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik bemoaned “Biden’s violent crime crisis.” Republicans, in general, have been shouting from every rooftop they can find that crime under Biden has gotten out of control, reached an all-time high, and brought America to a crisis level not seen since 1974 when everybody up and started Kung Fu fighting out of nowhere. (Don’t laugh—the GOP crime crisis narrative is just as absurd.) The doom and gloom picture that Republicans paint of America’s Gotham-like crime-ridden cities that have done nothing but deteriorate dramatically under Biden would be very alarming—if there was a single solitary shred of truth to it.

Speaker of the House and liar, Mike Johnson Source: The Washington Post / Getty

From CNN:

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.

There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”

Republicans spent the first night of the convention playing identity politics while pretending to oppose identity politics by parading all of their resident “Black friends” around as they did their one “Black job.” Their lies about crime were easily anticipated. After all, Republicans are telling Black people who think Trump is racist because of his demonstrably racist history and the words that come out of his own butthole-shaped mouth—that Trump isn’t racist. They’re arguing that we only think he is because the media and the Democrats are lying to us. 

Trump’s sunken shuck and jive brigade also played its role by emphasizing that Black people need Trump to save us economically because, under their beloved MAGA massa’, and Tuesday night’s RNC speakers were no different as they boasted about minority unemployment numbers under Trump. This includes Lara Trump, who claimed that under her father-in-law, there were “record low unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women.”

We’ve been over this before. It is true that Black and POC unemployment rates fell under Trump, but the important contextual fact the GOP loves to omit is that the same could be said for most of the last half-dozen U.S. presidents.

From Poynter.org:

The Census Bureau has consistently tabulated data on poverty, including the breakdown by race and ethnicity, since 1966.

The Black poverty rate hit a record low during Trump’s presidency in 2019 at 18.8%. The poverty rate has fallen further under Biden’s presidency, hitting 17.1% in 2022, the last year for which data is available.

Trump’s 2019 record low was 3.2 percentage points lower than 2016’s, the final year of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Biden’s 2022 record low was 2.5 percentage points lower than 2020’s, Trump’s final year.

Because the Black poverty rate has generally been trending down since the 1960s, numerous other presidents can claim to have achieved record lows on Black poverty during their tenure — including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden.

Anyway, back to the crime stuff.

Republicans at the RNC’s MAGA-fied Fib-o-thon also continued lying about crime rising in the U.S. due to the influx of migrants crossing the southern border. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claimed Biden and VP Kamala Harris have opened the borders up “to the entire world” and that the “prisons have been empty,” neither of which is true.

More from CNN:

“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” said Helen Fair, who is co-author of the World Prison Population List, which tracks the global prison population, and a research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly made such claims in his own speeches and interviews. But Trump has never provided any proof for the claim.

Trump’s campaign has provided CNN with only a vague 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about Venezuela freeing violent prisoners who had then joined migrant caravans.

But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.

The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List.

As for the crime, statistical facts continue to show there haven’t been any significant surges in crimes in the cities most migrants have come to, and that, in many of those cities, crime rates have fallen. Of course, these facts haven’t stopped our totally-not-racist ex-president from generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” into the U.S., baselessly claiming Mexican migrants are bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S., likening migrants to Hannibal Lecter, calling them “animals,” “not human,” and “sick,” and saying they are “poisoning the blood” of the country. (The “Heil Hitler!” energy is astounding, is it not?)

Republicans liars whose Klan-derwear is perpetually on fire keep telling Black and brown folks we need Trump’s GOP to save us while also vilifying Black and brown folks by lying about the crime we cause across the nation. They don’t bother presenting any data to contradict that of the FBI, local law enforcement and virtually every agency that specializes in tracking crime, because they know they won’t be challenged by their intended audience.

In other words: White supremacy is as white supremacy does, and nobody does it like MAGA America, which we can expect to keep double-doing it all the way up to November.

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