Republican politicians routinely claim that cities run by Democrats have been experiencing crime waves caused by failed governance, but a new study shows murder rates are actually higher in states and cities controlled by Republicans.
“We’re seeing murders in our cities, all Democrat-run,” former President Donald Trump asserted at a March 26 rally in Georgia. “People are afraid to go out.”
In February, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., blamed Democrats for a 2018 law that reduced some federal prison sentences — even though it was signed by Trump after passing a GOP-controlled Congress. “It’s your party who voted in lockstep for the First Step Act that let thousands of violent felons on the street who have now committed innumerable violent crimes,” Cotton said during a speech in the Senate.
Last December, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told Fox News viewers, “America’s most beautiful cities are indeed being ruined by liberal policies: There’s a direct line between death and decay and liberal policies.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at a rally on March 26 in Commerce, Ga. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
But a comparison of violent crime rates in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats and Republicans tells a very different story. In fact, a new study from the center-left think tank Third Way shows that states won by Trump in the 2020 election have higher murder rates than those carried by Joe Biden. The highest murder rates, the study found, are often in conservative, rural states.
The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump.
There are some examples of states Biden won in 2020 that also have high per capita murder rates, including New Mexico and Georgia, which have the seventh- and eighth-highest murder rates, respectively. And there are Trump-supporting states with low murder rates, such as Idaho and Utah. Broadly speaking, the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest, has more murders per capita than the Northeast, interior West and West Coast, the study found.
Those findings are consistent with a pattern that has existed for decades, in which the South has had higher rates of violent crime than the nation as a whole.
Demonstrators march in Atlanta on April 14, 2021, to protest the shooting death of Daunte Wright three days earlier. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
“We as criminologists have known this for quite some time,” Jennifer Ortiz, a professor of criminology at Indiana University Southeast, told Yahoo News. “States like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have historically had high crime rates.”
Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize some portions of the American South.
“They are among the poorest states in our union,” Ortiz said of the Deep South. “They have among the highest rates of child poverty. They are among the least-educated states. They are among the states with the highest levels of substance abuse. All of those factors contribute to people engaging in criminal behavior.”
“I thought that was a very good study,” Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, told Yahoo News about the Third Way report. “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher. I’m not certain that’s related to the fact that the governor is a Republican, but it’s a fact nonetheless.”
Police and emergency personnel work on a crime scene in Waukesha, Wis., in November 2021. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
(While the Third Way study divided states by presidential vote in 2020, using gubernatorial party affiliation leads to similar results because most states have recently chosen the same party for governor and for president. Based on presidential vote, eight of the 10 states with the highest murder rates lean Republican, versus seven of the top 10 if one uses the governor’s party.)
Although murder rates tend to be highest in the South, the biggest increases in 2020 were found in the Great Plains and Midwest, according to Third Way. The largest jumps were in Wyoming (91.7% higher than in 2019), South Dakota (69%), Wisconsin (63.2%), Nebraska (59.1%) and Minnesota (58.1%). Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska all voted for Trump and have Republican governors. Wisconsin and Minnesota voted for Biden and are led by Democrats.
Few large cities are governed by Republicans — only 26 of the 100 largest U.S. cities have Republican mayors — making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. But cities that do have Republican mayors do not have lower murder rates than similarly sized Democratic-led cities, the study found.
Some experts warn against the impulse to use crime data to score quick political points.
“Being a Republican or Democratic state or city is correlated with many other issues,” David Weisburd, a professor of criminology and executive director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “That means that the murder rate may be due to the state being Republican, or it may be due to the fact that Republican states have many other risk factors related to crime or murder rates. Even with a very comprehensive modeling of all of these factors, it is very difficult to get a valid causal result for explaining crime rates.”
Police tape blocks a street where a person was shot in a drug-related incident in Philadelphia in 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
That argument cuts both ways, however. Weisburd also thinks the claims of Trump and other Republicans who say Democrats have caused a crime wave in the cities and states they govern are unfounded. “I don’t think this argument can be supported no matter which way you go,” Weisburd said.
Murder rates in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2020 from record lows, and the increases are similar across states — regardless of partisan preference. For homicides in 2020, Third Way found a 32.2% uptick in Trump-backing states versus a 30.8% rise in those that voted for Biden. Some states with large cities, such as New York and Pennsylvania, saw larger-than-average increases: New York went up 47% and Pennsylvania is up 39%. But the largest increases were in rural, Republican-led states, including Montana (+84%) and South Dakota (+81%).
The higher national murder rate is naturally causing public concern, although violent crime does remain far below its early 1990s high point. “Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2019,” from 757 incidents per 100,000 people to 379 per 100,000, the Pew Research Center noted last November. Between 2019 and 2020, the murder rate jumped from 6 homicides per 100,000 people to 7.8 homicides per 100,000, but that was still 22% below the rate in 1991 of 10 homicides per 100,000.
Yesterday, I sat through first day of jury selection in the trial for my daughters killer. Since her murder, my mission is to reduce gun violence. Never should have been a partisan fight. Simply put, Republican states are deadlier & they need to change.https://t.co/uol9NUOr3E
“The 5 states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican. Broadly speaking, the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest, has more murders per capita than the Northeast and West.” https://t.co/1SI8ZFvk52
House Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman Jim Banks (R-IN) wrote in a letter to Disney CEO Bob Chapek he will fight to rescind Mickey Mouse’s copyright renewal over the megacorporation’s LGBT campaign.
Banks wrote to Chapek as the Mickey Mouse copyright will expire on January 1, 2024. Given Disney’s opposition to Gov. Ron Desantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act, and its push to include as “many, many many LGBTQIA characters in its stories,” he cannot support an extension of its copyrights.
Banks explained that Congress had repeatedly extended Disney’s copyright due to intense lobbying from Disney. Now, Disney could lose its copyright renewal when Republicans are slated to hold the House majority after the 2022 midterm elections.
Read the full article. Banks last appeared on JMG when he falsely claimed to be on the Capitol riot committee in letters to federal agencies seeking information to be turned over to the committee.
This is what the party of small government wants. Complete control over everything. Complete control over people from forced birth to what is indoctrinated to them in conservative run public schools, to what people can do in the bedrooms and this their genitals, to what businesses can do or say. That is freedom, right? Isn’t that why the maga crowd refused to wear masks because it took away their freedoms? But telling restricting what you can read, say, watch, and what sex you can have along with who you can marry due to the church doctrine is pure freedom. Not for me.
Next year, the woke Disney lobbyists will ask Congress to extend Micky Mouse’s trademark.
Parents and political groups lodged complaints against nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries and library systems across the country in 2021, a new record of conservative activism that largely targeted tomes involving race, gender and the LGBTQ community, a new report has found.
The American Library Association (ALA) said in its annual assessment that twice as many “challenges” to books were made over the course of one three-month period — from September to November of last year — than in the entirety of 2020. The 330 challenges in that period compared to 377 made in all of 2019.
“Gender Queer,” a graphic memoir of author Maia Kobabe’s life as a nonbinary queer person, was challenged more often than any other book, according to the group’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Five of the 10 most frequently challenged books are about the LGBTQ community, the association found.
Also among the books most likely to be attacked are novels that contain sexually explicit references or content, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
“We support individual parents’ choices concerning their child’s reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others,” said Patricia Wong, the ALA’s president. “Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives. So, despite this organized efforts to ban books, libraries remain ready to do what we always have: make knowledge and ideas available so people are free to choose what to read.”
The new push to ban certain books also came as conservatives focused campaigns against critical race theory, a legal theory taught in some law school and graduate school settings. Conservatives in states like Idaho, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida have approved legislation banning teaching of some concepts of race in schools, bans that are so broad that some teachers have warned they risk running afoul of the new laws if they teach about the Holocaust.
In Wyoming, a group of parents filed a criminal complaint against public library officials over sex education books. In Texas, a state lawmaker proposed a list of 849 banned books.
The true number of banned and challenged books is likely much higher than the library association could document. The group said its list relies on media reports and self-reporting by library systems across the country, and that as much as 90 percent of challenges to books go unreported.
— American Library Association (@ALALibrary) April 4, 2022
Complaints about books at public schools and libraries more than doubled in 2021, the American Library Association says. The association counted more than 700 complaints last year, the most since it began keeping records more than 20 years ago. https://t.co/KKYYtwm6mU
The University Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity student survey mandated by the Republican-led Legislature during the 2021 Session was distributed to college students across the state Monday morning.
There are 13 total questions on the student survey that ask whether students feel their university or campus is a place where free political or belief expression can take place, and whether their professors create that environment and to what degree express their own political opinions.
The first section includes questions ranging from whether there is an environment of free speech on campus to whether professors allow room for “free and welcomed” expression in the classroom.
The Board of Governors and State Board of Education will be required to compile and publish the results. The proposal also mandates that students be exposed to a variety of political viewpoints and that they not be “shielded” from those arguments. Supporters of the legislation accused universities of drowning out conservative student voices.
A federal judge last week denied an emergency request to stop the survey, though opponents can still file an appeal. In a letter to its members, the United Faculty of Florida urged faculty, staff and students to ignore the survey, saying it would create a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association on campuses.
First look at questions asked in controversial Florida university viewpoint diversity survey
The massive digital billboards will be up for eight weeks in five major Florida markets, including Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa and West Palm Beach
•
NYC Mayor Adams says he is putting up billboards in Florida to try and convince gay residents to move to New York City in response to the Parental Rights in Education law that makes it illegal to teach sexual orientation to K-3rd graders. https://t.co/QVuK0IyCma
New York City, where the Stonewall Inn riots ignited what many consider to be the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, has long voiced its support for that community. Now it wants its message heard in one place, especially: Florida.
Starting Monday, Mayor Eric Adams is wallpapering the Sunshine State with digital billboards espousing New York City’s vociferous opposition to the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law, he said Monday.
The GOP legislation, which has drawn intense national scrutiny, bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, which the mayor called a “targeted attack on the LGBTQ+ population.”
The billboards, Adams said from City Hall, will be up for eight weeks in five major Florida markets, including Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa and West Palm Beach, and are expected to deliver an estimated 5 million impressions.
“This is the city of Stonewall. This is the city where we are proud to talk about how you can live in a comfortable setting and not be harassed, not be abused — not only as adults but also as young people,” Adams said.
The campaign started Monday and runs through May 29. Creative content was donated by major ad agencies including WPP Companies, WMLY&R, BCW, H+K Strategies and Kinetic, Adams said. Kinetic secured the ad space.
The mayor displayed some billboard samples as he made the announcement.
The more important news is that Hungary’s proposed anti-LGBTQ referendum failed to go forward in yesterday’s national election.
Hungary’s referendum on a law concerning LGBTQ issues especially concerning minors – criticized as homophobic both within and outside the country – has failed to reach a minimum quorum of 50 percent of valid votes, the National Election Office said Monday.
Only 44 percent of the votes cast Sunday were found to be valid, rendering the process null. Besides the valid votes, another 20 percent were not counted because over incorrect markings or protest messages, as demanded by LGBT rights organizations and the opposition.
The referendum sought popular endorsement of a law that was initially introduced to fight child abuse. However, the ruling Fidesz party led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, added to it sections on pedophilia and a ban on talking to minors about homosexuality and sex change.
The news above has apparently not reached DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw, who was recently hailed as a “gay icon” in a column published by the Log Cabin Republicans. Last month Pushaw participated in an online pro-Don’t Say Gay forum orchestrated by convicted homocon rioter Brandon Straka.
The right smells blood in the water and they are coming for the LGBTQ+ as hard as they can. This is no longer just about grifting money out of the believers. They think they can do to the gays, queers, and trans people what they did to abortion in the SCOTUS. If they can convince the people that gays are trying to groom, prey on, molest, recruit, and make your kids gay / transgender then they can not only win elections but force all those icky people back into the closet and slam the doors shut. Where have we heard all that slander before against gay people? In the past it was used all the time. Anita Bryant was spouting it in Florida in the 1970s, and the right has not updated their attack menu. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. But it is the last gasp of a dying political party that is shrinking and wants to keep its minority rule. They need a villain to do it, to keep their base riled up. And if they win using these old tools they will keep trying to drive the country regressive and to vilify anyone not a white Christian cis straight person. Prepare to be forced to pay a tax to the local Christian church sect of your choice because that is required in countries that religions take over. Also all schools will promote and teach the Church doctrine as is practiced in some countries now. I did not know public schools in the US had to enforce or use the doctrines of the Christain faith, but I guess they do in the red states. Will advanced learning be the next thing on the chopping block? Only the children of the wealthy will have advanced education. Workers’ kids will be taught only enough as the job requires. All hail the return to the dark ages of robber barons.
Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has said she was “shocked” after reading Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” but not for the same reasons as many other Democrats. The legislation, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by opponents, forbids discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public school classrooms for kindergarten through third grade, which Gabbard says may not go far enough.
“I was shocked to learn it only protects kids from kindergarten until third grade. Third grade? What about 12th grade or not at all?” Gabbard said in a video posted to her Twitter on Monday. The former congresswoman then turned her sights on the government, saying they have “no place in our personal lives” or “our bedrooms.”
Parental rights, she claimed, “are under attack all across the country,” including in Florida where the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has become a lightning rod for controversy. Critics claim the bill discriminates and could affect what is taught in classrooms, while supporters have pointed out the fact that the word “gay” appears nowhere in the short bill.
Gabbard, who unsuccessfully ran for the 2020 presidential nomination as a Democrat, called on schools to focus on essential education, something Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has also said when defending the education bill.
“Our schools are failing. Nationally, 34 percent of our students are below basic reading level in the fourth grade. 25 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Now I’m confident that if our schools focused on educating our kids … we would see our literacy rates improve and set our young people up for success,” Gabbard said.
When I first heard about Florida’s Parental Rights bill, I was shocked it only protects children K-3. Third grade? How about 12th grade—or not at all. Meanwhile, schools are failing: 1 in 4 graduates are functionally illiterate. Parents should raise their kids, not the government pic.twitter.com/CycF8cKRh3
