From the Washington Post opinion page:

It’s just murder living in a red state

By Dana Milbank
Columnist

October 11, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

… Though the MAGA crowd is not one to let facts get in the way of a good attack, let’s pause the fearmongering for a moment to consider a few relevant truths:

Violent crime is not soaring. In fact, it might be declining.

Most violent crime is committed by White people.

Non-Hispanic whites are only 59.3% of the population, and considerably older than nonwhites. Is it really sensible to suggest that whites commit the majority of violent crime?

I suspect Milbank doesn’t know that the FBI counts almost all Hispanics as white, although nobody else does anymore.

Violent crime is generally worse in Republican-run states.

Crime did soar in 2020 during the pandemic, which also happened to be Trump’s final year in office.

It also happened to be the year of George Floyd’s death, but who can remember that far back? The whole George Floyd thing is officially forgotten until after Tuesday, November 8, 2022.

Crime did soar in 2020 during the pandemic, which also happened to be Trump’s final year in office. But in 2021, the FBI found in its annual report on crime last week, crime was stable. In fact, overall violent crime declined slightly, by 1 percent, from 2020, largely because of a 9 percent drop in robbery. Homicides increased slightly, by 4 percent.

We are at a new normal. A bad new normal.

The numbers aren’t highly reliable because a change in data collection requirements in 2021 led fewer jurisdictions to cooperate and forced the FBI to rely more than usual on estimates. Still, the FBI findings are consistent with others. The Council on Criminal Justice found that homicides increased in the cities it studied by 5 percent in 2021, about the same as the FBI found.

The FBI stats, which are indeed of even poorer quality than before, found that blacks were 60.4% of known murder offenders in 2021.

Also, year-to-date statistics from 90 big U.S. cities compiled by AH Datalytics show homicides are down about 5 percent this year.

Wow, swell, homicides will be in 2022 only 30% higher than in 2019.

Those “who do the crime,” as Tuberville put it, aren’t the color the Alabamian supposes they are. A report last year from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, using 2018 data, found that White people were offenders in 52 percent of nonfatal violent crimes overall (and 56 percent of rapes or sexual assaults) in which the victim identified the race of the offender. Black people were offenders in 29 percent of nonfatal violent crimes (22 percent of rapes or sexual assaults). Hispanics were offenders in 14 percent of nonfatal violent crimes.

Why in the world is that horrible Sailer person focusing on fatal crimes, when what we should focus on is nonfatal crimes?

The proportion of Black offenders was high relative to the Black proportion of the population (likely a reflection of poverty) but not the stuff of Republican ad-makers’ crime fantasies.

Does anybody at the Washington Post know how bad the 2021 homicide ratio was?

If MAGA leaders are truly concerned about violent crime, they might look inward. Earlier this year, the centrist Democratic group Third Way crunched the 2020 homicide figures and found that per capita homicide rates were on average 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities.

Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural.

What else could Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee have in common other than Republicanism?