Violent crime rates in the United States have significantly declined under President Biden, even though most Americans either don’t know that or won’t believe it. U.S. homicides, in particular, experienced a record drop in 2023. Despite this, many Americans say that they are increasingly concerned about violent crime.
Watch the video above to hear Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman’s explanation for why Americans perceive violent crime as a growing concern despite consistent data indicating that crime rates have been dropping in recent years.
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The following is an excerpt of the above video:
And the reality is that in the United States, if you zoom way out, crime has been declining — the murder rate, violent crime, property crime — it’s been declining for a really long time. We did see a spike during COVID, and there are a number of different reasons why that may be, which are beyond the scope of this discussion but under Joe Biden, overall, we’ve seen crime continue to decline.
If you haven’t heard that, a lot of the reason is that the corporate media is not doing a great job of covering it. And right-wing media is playing up the dystopian crime-riddled country that they say exists under Joe Biden, even absent any evidence that that is actually what is going on. The reality check is that crime is down in most places.
Now let’s go through the most common retorts from right-wingers about this, because these are the ones that they love to talk about all the time. First, they’ll say, “You’re just wrong, crime is up, you’re lying.” What I would say to those folks is, “Bring me the evidence that crime is up, bring me the data that says that crime is up under Joe Biden.“
So then, often they will retreat to a different argument, and they will say, “How could crime be down? Didn’t you hear about that murder in San Antonio? Didn’t you hear about the carjackings in Oakland? It’s terrible out there!” And of course, our response as empiricists who don’t go by anecdotes is to say, “That’s an anecdote. In a country of 340 million people, there will, of course, be some crime. That doesn’t tell us whether overall the crime rate is going up or down.“
So then they will often go, “Okay, listen, maybe you’re right. Maybe your statistics show that crime is down. But here’s the problem: Democrats have defunded the police, and people don’t even call the cops anymore, so the crimes aren’t even being reported.” The reality is that funding for public safety is up under Democrats. Democrats have not defunded the police. Almost no one on the Left wants to defund the police.