In this column published by the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology Raj Ghoshal counters many of the assertions politicians are making about crime in the United States.
By Raj Ghoshal
I’ve taught criminology courses for the last 14 years at three universities, including at Elon University in North Carolina. I find both crime and popular misunderstandings of crime fascinating, so I tuned into the second day of the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that focused on the theme of “Make America Safe Again” to check what politicians are telling us about crime.
What I saw left me dismayed, a reaction I’m confident nearly every criminologist would share. My core disappointment wasn’t about politics, but more basic: many of the factual claims made by speakers were so misleading that anyone who watched the convention would have emerged with less knowledge of crime than they had going in.
First, several speakers criticized a supposed crime boom, but the reality is nearly opposite: America is in the midst of a striking crime decline. The FBI finds that violent crime is now about half as common as during its peak in the 1990s, and property crime has fallen even more. It is likely that the last three years will each go into the record books as seeing some of the steepest crime declines ever.
We should be celebrating and learning from this crime drop, but we can’t do so when politicians pretend it isn’t happening.
Second, speakers blamed immigrants for a wide range of crimes. But studies consistently show that immigrants commit crime less often than U.S.-born Americans, and American cities with the most unauthorized immigrants have crime trends in line with the rest of the country. One high-quality study even found U.S.-born natives are two to three times more likely to be arrested for serious crimes than unauthorized immigrants.
Third, several RNC speakers portrayed the modern Republican Party as taking serious measures to fight crime, but none noted a concerning fact: whatever may have been true in the past, Republican politicians during the Trump era have repeatedly pushed ill-advised “soft on crime” policies.
As president, Trump sought to cut nearly $300 million from local police funding, perhaps in part because he disagreed with programs like body cameras and police-community engagement. He repeatedly tried to defund the COPS program that gave cities millions to enhance connections between police departments and citizens — a goal of particular importance in the post-George Floyd era, as crime soars if residents come to distrust police.
Trump’s supporters in Congress recently voted to reduce funding to the FBI and Department of Justice, and succeeded in cutting IRS funding used to pursue the country’s biggest tax cheats and corporate criminals. They have blocked consideration of any serious gun safety measures even as guns continue to be used in a majority of homicides. Trump-allied Republicans are currently pushing personnel and funding cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which works to combat terrorism and gun crimes.
Despite its tough rhetoric, the ”law-and-order” party has taken a pronounced turn toward lawlessness in Trump era. Democrats haven’t been perfect, either, but they’ve largely pursued the kind of balanced approach that criminologists support. That includes funding improvements in law enforcement that both protect public safety and promote trust between police and citizens.
For anyone truly interested in continuing our country’s recent progress in reducing crime, tuning out false claims like those we heard from politicians in Milwaukee would be a wise first step.
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Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of Elon University.