GOP Is Better At Talking About Murder Than Reducing It

The Republicans have been saying a lot about the murder rate in this country -- blaming liberals for being soft on crime. But the truth is that the red states (those ran by Republicans) have a bigger problem with murder than the blue states -- with the actual murder rate being much higher. The Republicans are good at whining and blaming, but they don't seem to be able to solve the very problem they complain about.

The following is part of an op-ed by Jonathan Capehart in The Washington Post:

To hear the Senate minority leader tell it, the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is all but a liberal soft-on-crime plot against America. As part of his ongoing attacks against Jackson — never mind that she’s supported by the Fraternal Order of Police — Sen. Mitch McConnell has been hammering away at the spike in violent crimes around the country.

McConnell’s line of attack dovetails with the fearmongering at Fox News and on the right that crime is flourishing in places run by Democrats. This tactic is as predictable as it is tiresome. It’s also only half the story; Republicans are conveniently ignoring the even sorrier state of many places where they’re in charge.

“We are in the middle of a violent crime wave including soaring rates of homicides and carjackings,” McConnell droned during a floor speech March 15. “Amid all this, the soft-on-crime brigade is squarely in Judge Jackson’s corner.” What McConnell doesn’t tell you is that his home state of Kentucky has the third-highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. In fact, eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates in 2020 voted that year for Donald Trump.

This startling data is revealed in a new report from centrist think tank Third Way. Mississippi leads the way with a 2020 homicide rate of 20.5 per 100,000 residents, the report says, and “the five states with the highest murder rates, all Trump-voting states, had rates at least 240 percent higher than New York’s murder rate and at least 150 percent higher than California’s.”

The report further points out that the homicide rate averaged across all states that went for Trump was 40 percent higher in 2020 than the homicide rate in all states Joe Biden won. And six out of the 10 states with the greatest increase in homicide rates over 2019 levels voted for Trump, including McConnell’s Kentucky — which saw a 58 percent spike. . . .

We in the media are certainly guilty of repeating that story ad infinitum and of making murder and mayhem seem solely like an urban, blue-state phenomenon. But Republicans bear a hefty load of responsibility in all this. Crime has no party affiliation, yet Republicans have spent generations exploiting it and the fear of it for political gain. They hype tragic stories in progressive cities while ignoring events just as heartbreaking in their own backyards.

In its conclusion, the Third Way report contends that “Republicans do a far better job blaming others for high murder rates than actually reducing high murder rates.” Data shows us that’s true.