Crime is down

Republicans lie and say it’s up

Homicide is down 30% year-to-date in DC this year. Violent crime down 35%.Is this news to you? Probably, because most media focuses on stoking fear about crime through anecdote, rather than actual data
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T16:53:40.230Z

With only two weeks left in the year, Philly is on track to have its lowest number of homicides in a DECADE, and its third-best year since 2007.Down 37% since last year, down FIFTY PERCENT since 2022.The entire Covid spike, absolutely wiped out.And the coverage? Basically crickets.
— John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T16:12:13.801Z

The right-wing exaggerates crime by immigrants

Immigration is a top issue for voters, so it’s especially important to know the facts: undocumented immigrants are not responsible for higher crime rates. https://t.co/ofXCHEEMIf
— Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) July 4, 2024

Trump said that migrants are “killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen before.”

But immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes, and undocumented immigrants have even lower crime rates than legal ones. @Morning_Joe pic.twitter.com/Oj38noB8Sr
— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) July 1, 2024

New polling shows that an increasing number of Americans are concerned that legal immigrants to the U.S. will commit crimes. This comes amid increasingly harsh rhetoric from the GOP on immigration. https://t.co/UnTOpl4dpB
— Axios (@axios) March 29, 2024

This is a conservative think tank. https://t.co/W1pXq68O5O
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 27, 2024

The "migrant crime wave" narrative, a constant refrain on Fox News, is built around anecdotes — the network's on-air talent openly scoff at actual crime data. https://t.co/HHsITjqKV7 https://t.co/NiUqmD4XfT
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) February 29, 2024

Trump's claims of a migrant crime wave are not supported by national data

An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data shows overall crime levels dropping in cities that have received the most migrants.https://t.co/saOQGomNMj
— Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez) February 29, 2024

Scientific American: “Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens” https://t.co/uRPCNCm2WF
— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) February 27, 2024

Opinion: Trump stokes fear about migrants driving up crime rate, despite data debunking that https://t.co/q1yW2LWK0G
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) August 25, 2024

For all the talk at the RNC about "migrant crime," there actually is no migrant crime surge recently and over the long term there is no relationship between immigration and crime trends, according to statistics. @germanrlopez https://t.co/wnV0dbNO4Q pic.twitter.com/R0LFHEKmcZ
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) July 18, 2024

REMINDER: "research indicates that immigrants commit less crimes than US-born people"

"researchers at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, looked into Texas…found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a crime"https://t.co/T9rKTicosS
— Brandon Richards 🐻 (@BrandonRichards) July 17, 2024

"The argument is always that Biden’s policies are to blame for these horrors. But at the most obvious level, this is absurd, because immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans do."https://t.co/UOQN4up8nc
— The New Republic (@newrepublic) June 22, 2024

There is no immigrant crime wave

“What’s more, the arrival of record numbers of immigrants at the United States–Mexico border over the past two years has not corresponded with an overall increase in crime.”

The @BrennanCenter debunks myths around the so-called migrant crime wave ⬇️https://t.co/0x2h3XsaZM
— newamericanld.bsky.social (@NewAmericanLd) June 12, 2024

Some politicians and pundits are pushing the idea that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes. Not only is that claim false, the opposite is true. https://t.co/ofXCHEEMIf
— Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) June 7, 2024

Here's a Stat That Republicans don't want you to know:

Undocumented immigrants, on average, reduce the crime rate per capita in America, according to a study in Texas between 2012-18:

– US-Born citizens commit Murder 252% more than Undocumented immigrants.

– US-Born citizens… pic.twitter.com/WjDNzF0bm9
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) February 28, 2024

Trump’s 2015 claim that immigrants were criminals was novel enough that his party was skeptical. Enter Fox News, talking about migrants and crime more than twice as much as CNN and MSNBC combined. https://t.co/irDqfUUJRg
— Philip Bump (@pbump) February 27, 2024

There’s been an explosion of research into the rates at which undocumented immigrants commit crime. Guess what? Immigrants do NOT engage in more crime than native-born people in the U.S. And immigration actually can cause crime to go down. https://t.co/XVCi572gBG pic.twitter.com/ecYqi5uugi
— Emily A. The Spirit of Jezebel (@emzorbit) February 28, 2024

Crime is down

New FBI data shows crime is down in America.
Murders ⬇️ 26.4%
Rape ⬇️ 25.7%
Car theft ⬇️ 15.2%
Assault ⬇️ 12.5%

Joe Biden's America…https://t.co/uVyUJGzFjP
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 11, 2024

Violent crime is down and the US murder rate is plunging https://t.co/FCgJdgjJI0
— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) June 11, 2024

Significant drop in violent crimes and robberies, with 77% of agencies reporting: FBI Releases 2024 Quarterly Crime Report and Use-of-Force Data Update — FBI ⁦@FBI⁩ https://t.co/byBTsXn8Lk
— Frank Figliuzzi (@FrankFigliuzzi1) June 11, 2024

Crime exaggeration was the right-wing 2022 version of the caravan

Coverage slowed down after the election was over.

Fox's 2022 midterm season violent crime coverage was their 2018 midterm season caravan coverage all over again https://t.co/iMuYahnR2D pic.twitter.com/oGYi8J3FdZ
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) November 17, 2022

New from me & @nickpwing: The Republicans spent the last year+ trying to link Democrats to a wildly exaggerated "crime wave"—per exit polling, it was not an issue most voters actually cared about & strongly suggests police-reform is still a winning message https://t.co/FZaSWozqWz
— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) November 11, 2022

Public perception on crime doesn’t line up well with reality, and hasn’t for quite some time.@Jamiles & @Weihua_Li1 looked at the data last week: https://t.co/0fL0NzIGCS
— The Marshall Project (@MarshallProj) November 11, 2022

This is outrageous and yet not at all surprising. The yellow is the “actual rise” in violent crime in NYC. The purple is coverage of it. This doesn’t even count the $50 million GOP spent on ads lying to people about crime to influence their vote. pic.twitter.com/0ACgJ01RvN
— Scott Hechinger (@ScottHech) November 8, 2022

More on red state murder and crime rates

Finally, a Democrat calls out a Republican on the truth about crime rates — violent crime rates are higher in Oklahoma than New York and Californa. This will be fact checked. #okgovdebate pic.twitter.com/lm0KTpgViT
— danny (@dabbs346) October 19, 2022

Threading due to popular request!
Thank u for writing on our report @marcthiessen. A few facts you glossed over. Fact 1) in 2020, Trump-voting states had murder rates 40% > than Biden-voting states (11,521 murders/140,533,769 pop vs 10,946/189,418,128) https://t.co/a18fDzo8Tv 1/
— Jim Kessler (@ThirdWayKessler) October 19, 2022

Oklahoma has a higher murder rate than New York, presumably because of all the leftist governance the state has been subject to by Kevin Sitt and the state legislature. pic.twitter.com/KX3r3DgAh2
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 19, 2022

In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.

8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century. https://t.co/L5UoyywXwJ
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) October 16, 2022

You can exclude every murder committed in St. Louis and Kansas City, and Missouri would still have a higher murder rate than states like NY, NJ, and CT. https://t.co/1nS3eBUtVk
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) October 21, 2022

I keep seeing arguments about claims that with all the GOP complaints abt crime it's really the red states that are driving the crime numbers. Well, this is actually a topic I've been studying for many years. And in fact most of what we now call "red states" have had …
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 22, 2022

Crime has been declining but that’s not what people think

70% of Americans think crime is worse than it was the year before. Year-over-year property crime declined in 27 of the 30 years studied, & violent crime in 23 of 30. Crime has been declining since 1990, & Americans almost always think it is getting worse. https://t.co/WFKDsnjDIV
— cℓaudia stєℓℓ✰r ‏ ✂️ (@ClaudiaStellar) October 1, 2022

Let's review:
-Dems are suddenly on the defensive over "crime"
-Crime isn't actually up
-It's coming from increased Fox coverage

Politics is shaped directly by media signals. Democrats are responding to those signals, Republicans are producing them. Who would you rather be? https://t.co/JLr1XEKB7P
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) October 7, 2022

About 5 million people (1.5% of US residents) are arrested & booked into jails each year. When over 11k were released from federal prisons to mitigate Covid spread, 17 committed new crimes. That’s a ~90% lower crime rate than among the general population.https://t.co/Lln7oms5uT
— Eric Reinhart (@_Eric_Reinhart) October 2, 2022

NATIONAL POLL: Inflation, crime, elections & voting, jobs, and immigration are the issues most Americans want the federal government to address.
Less than half approve of @POTUS Biden’s handling of these issues. https://t.co/YXPw36T85D pic.twitter.com/8cEdDNw38V
— MonmouthPoll (@MonmouthPoll) October 3, 2022

After massive #crime spike on Trump's watch "overall violent crimes dropped 1% in 2021" in Biden's first year. https://t.co/0gjWGxfJgr @POTUS
— Jim Kessler (@ThirdWayKessler) October 5, 2022

It’s amazing how well the GOP’s messaging on crime has worked despite it flying in the face of the most easily accessible data ever pic.twitter.com/HvTx4ewGsi
— 🥦👠TheSpanishFlu🌪🌽 (@_fat_ugly_rat_) October 8, 2022