Is violent crime rising or falling? If you’re tuned into social media or the 24-hour news cycle as practiced by Fox and CNN, you probably think it is soaring out of control. The graph above shows an uneven but unmistakably upward trend.
Heather Mac Donald, as always, has the data and the perspective. Check out her piece in the Dec. 26-27 Wall Street Journal. (To avoid the paywall, google “Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime,” rather than trying to access Ms. Mac Donald’s essay from the Journal’s website via the link provided.)
Ms. Mac Donald presents an interesting set of conflicts among those with an interest in crime data and a political ax to grind. She observes that liberal groups are trying to conceal or manipulate the data to suggest violent crime, especially in the cities, is not really increasing.
She offers quite a bit of evidence, including data from the Brennan Center for Justice, which I received in my inbox Monday morning. But her findings are somewhat counter-intuitive. After all, you’d think progressives/liberals, who claim to be supporters of poor people, minorities and other disadvantaged Americans, would want to exaggerate urban violence — the better to get more help for those suffering from this plague. Superficially, for them to “hide the rise of violent crime” is akin to conservatives who are skeptical about global warming trying to hide 15-plus years of stable temperatures.
Ah, but it’s not that simple. Ms. Mac Donald contends progressives have a different agenda. They’ve been striving for years to block police tactics such as stop-and-frisk, and what she calls the “Ferguson Effect” — named for the riotous aftermath of the shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Mo., by a white officer in 2014 — has caused police to back off. Ms. Mac Donald believes the policies promoted by progressives have increased crime, especially in urban areas populated mainly by minority residents.
So the implication of her research seems to be: Progressives are pushing policies that harm black people and the poor. And they don’t want these groups to discern what’s been done to them. So they cover up the magnitude of the bloodshed.
As if they haven’t been doing harm to minorities and the poor since the mid-1960s, and as if they haven’t been blaming Republicans for the failures of their own policies. It’s fun to watch them squirm as they worry that the people they’ve been abusing for half a century (a lot longer than that, if you count the Democrats’ role in Jim Crow, and the racist attitudes of leading progressives such as Woodrow Wilson) might begin to catch on to what’s been done to them.