Good morning. We're covering Republican claims about crime — plus Hurricane Idalia, Mitch McConnell and Korean fine dining. |
 | | A prayer vigil in Florida after the Jacksonville shooting.Malcolm Jackson for The New York Times |
|
Republican politicians often treat it as an established fact: Where they are in power, crime is low. Where Democrats are in power, crime is high. |
"Republican-run cities are doing very nicely because they arrest people when you have crimes," Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson last week. |
"The cities and these left-wing states allowing criminals to run wild on our streets, that doesn't work," Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor, said in March, citing New York in particular. |
But party rule does not drive crime. Consider DeSantis's state, Florida. Its homicide rate was roughly 50 percent higher than New York's in 2021. Florida's two most populous cities, Jacksonville and Miami, each had a homicide rate more than double New York City's last year, even though both had Republican mayors. |
This is not to say Republican leadership leads to more crime. You can find examples of blue states and cities doing worse than Florida, and of other red states and cities doing better. Looking at all the data, it is hard to make much of any connection between political partisanship and crime. To put it another way, prominent Republicans are misrepresenting the country's crime problem. |
The Republican claim is rooted in a real pattern. Big cities generally have higher crime rates than rural and suburban areas, thanks to their density and other factors. Democrats run most big cities because urban areas tend to contain more liberal voters. So when looking at the places with the most murders, you'll often find Democratic-run cities. But that is not the whole story. |
Take the 20 largest U.S. cities. The 16 run by Democratic mayors had 12.3 murders for every 100,000 people. The three Republican-run cities — Jacksonville, Fort Worth and Oklahoma City — had a rate of 11.4. There is a difference, but it is small. (I'm focused on murders because the data for them is more reliable than for other crimes, which go underreported.) |
Those rates mask a lot of variation. In a ranked list of murders for all 20 cities, the three Republican-run cities fall around the middle. Some blue cities — such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle — have roughly half the murder rates as their red counterparts, while the rates in other blue cities, like Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Chicago, are two to three times as high. |
That variation is the point: Whether a big city is run by Democrats or Republicans has little influence on its murder rate. |
The same is true at the state level for homicides, as this map by my colleague Ashley Wu shows: |
 | | Source: C.D.C. | Data is from 2021. | By The New York Times |
|
Once again, it's hard to see a strong link between party rule and killings. The four deadliest states are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico. Two have Democratic governors, and two have Republican governors. Some red states look bad, and some look good. The same is true for blue states. |
So what drives higher crime rates? The state map offers a few answers. Rural areas tend to have lower crime and murder rates. (But when murders surged and then fell across the U.S. starting in 2020, rural places experienced a similar pattern.) Poverty and race play a role, both of which are historically linked to violence in cities. |
Access to guns is another major factor, particularly for murders. Guns make any conflict more likely to escalate into deadly violence, and they can embolden criminals. On this issue, there is a partisan divide — Democrats are more comfortable regulating firearms — and that could help explain higher levels of violence in Republican states, especially in the South. It can also explain violence in cities, which get a lot of guns from Southern states with laxer laws. |
There are many more variables. It is a point that this newsletter has made before: Crime is a complicated issue, touching on personal disputes, the economy, social services and, really, almost every other aspect of society. Only a few factors are significant enough to make a big difference by themselves — and partisanship is not one of them. |
Related: Tennessee held a special legislative session on gun violence after a mass shooting at a Nashville school. Lawmakers enacted no major policy changes. |
 | | Damage in Horseshoe Beach, Fla.Emily Kask for The New York Times |
|
- Idalia, now a tropical storm, is dumping rain and flooding streets in North Carolina, where some school districts have canceled class today. It hit South Carolina overnight.
- More than 300,000 customers in the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia are without power this morning.
- The storm slammed into a sparsely populated area of Florida yesterday as a Category 3 hurricane. It wrecked homes and businesses but brought less damage than feared.
- Two people died in car crashes blamed on the weather conditions.
|
- At least 73 people were killed today as fire ripped through a building in Johannesburg. Some residents jumped from windows to escape.
- It's not clear what started the fire early this morning. But the building had become a crowded informal settlement, where people often lit fires to keep warm.
|
 | | Mitch McConnellKenny Holston/The New York Times |
|
- Chile's president announced a plan to find the remains of people killed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s.
- The weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have made their manufacturer so successful that it's reshaping Denmark's economy.
- She rose from poverty as China prospered, and then everything fell apart: Read Li Yuan's latest Times column, on China's economic problems as reflected in one woman's life.
|
 | | Drone damage in Moscow last month.Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock |
|
- Temperatures of 100-plus degrees are contributing to the deaths of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico.
- Prosecutors are investigating Tesla's use of company funds on a project that had been described internally as a house for Elon Musk, The Wall Street Journal reports.
- Transit officials promised to add elevators to hundreds of New York City subway stations in the coming decades. They have completed work on two.
|
Early-stage prostate and breast cancer behave differently from other cancers. We should give them a different name, Laura Esserman and Scott Eggener argue. |
Here's a column by Zeynep Tufekci on bird flu. |
Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. |
Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You'll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. |
 | | In Britain.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images |
|
Meltdown: Big Gay Ice Cream had widespread success. Now it's in debt — and in court. |
Welcome to Singers: A Brooklyn bar hosts cigarette marathons and sauna raves. |
Lives Lived: Laszlo Birinyi's stock-picking strategy, which tracked the flow of money, won him a reputation for prescience in the 1990s. He died at 79. |
Making history: The Nebraska women's volleyball team played in front of 92,003 fans last night — a world record in women's sport. |
More trouble: Authorities in the Dominican Republic are investigating a second formal complaint against Wander Franco about having an inappropriate relationship with a minor. |
No trade: Despite rumors, and though he's still holding out on a contract, San Francisco brass says the star defensive end Nick Bosa won't be traded. |
 | | At NARO.Karsten Moran for The New York Times |
|
New food: Fine dining in New York City is evolving: New restaurants are opening quickly and the types of food they are serving has changed. |
Korean owners and chefs now run about a dozen of the city's most prominent high-end restaurants. Their rise, which has been remarkably swift, brings to an end the unquestioned supremacy of French cuisine that lasted for decades, The Times's food critic Pete Wells writes. |
 | | Johnny Miller for The New York Times |
|
Roast the ingredients to bring out flavor in this shrimp boil. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German |
 | Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Amy Fiscus News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Lyna Bentahar, Lauren Jackson, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lauren Hard Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment