One of these issues was to make numerous stops over the weekend in cities that his ideological allies view as crime-infested mud pits. DeSantis visited Philadelphia, Chicago and New York in his swing, speaking up how he and Florida have been addressing crime correctly and people cities and their leaders weren’t.
On Twitter, he shared a abstract of his cease in New York — talking to police in Staten Island, which is sort of a Democrat visiting the hostile red-state territory of a public library in Austin.
I visited Staten Island to speak about how regulation & order has been central to FL’s success.
FL leads the nation in defending LEOs & our crime fee is at a 50-year low, whereas NYC noticed a 23% surge in main crime in 2022.
Anti-police politicians ought to cease catering to the woke mob. pic.twitter.com/FpFDy0V4DZ
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantisFL) February 20, 2023
Florida “leads the nation in protecting LEOS [law enforcement officers] & our crime rate is at a 50-year low,” he wrote, “while NYC saw a 23% surge in major crime in 2022. Anti-police politicians should stop catering to the woke mob.”
That final bit is the level: It’s the “woke” insurance policies of Democratic cities that leads them to have such terrible crime, whereas the presumably non-woke efforts of DeSantis are unalloyed successes. DeSantis has a notoriously malleable definition of “woke,” but when the wails of right-wing media can function a information for what he’s complaining about — as they invariably have in the previous — he means issues like reducing funding for police departments or revising prosecution practices.
Before we assess that, although, let’s think about DeSantis’s precise claims about crime, the data he provides to determine the basis for his argument. Is it the case that Florida has been profitable whereas New York hasn’t been?
You would suppose this query has a simple reply. It doesn’t.
Last yr, as rhetoric in the midterms grew to become more and more targeted on crime, I famous that the dialogue was hampered by incomplete and delayed crime data. While police departments actually know what number of arrests they’ve made, they don’t at all times — and in reality usually don’t — share that information publicly. How crimes are categorized may also differ at a neighborhood stage, which is one motive there’s a nationwide data assortment run by the FBI known as Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR).
Unfortunately for our present discussions of crime, although, the FBI was in the midst of transitioning to a brand new methodology of data assortment simply as the pandemic hit. Figures for 2021, then, weren’t similar to 2020′s — and lots of jurisdictions didn’t present 2021 data in the new system. So, whereas Fox News was keen to speak about crime spiking from the early fall till about an hour after polls closed final November, there truly wasn’t good data on whether or not crime was rising or falling nationally. At least one indication, an analysis of how usually crimes have been reported, urged little change from 2020 to 2021 — however even that was almost a yr previous by Election Day.
So let’s simply think about DeSantis’s numbers in the context of what we do know.
First, he’s evaluating apples and oranges — Big Apples and Florida oranges, if you’ll. He provides a quantity for the enhance in “major crime” in New York City, 23 %, and contrasts that with Florida being at a 50-year-low in crime. Those are very totally different measures.
We do have one direct measure we are able to take a look at: homicides in New York City vs. homicides in Florida’s most populous metropolis, Jacksonville. In 2021, the New York Police Department recorded 488 homicides. The yr following, it was down to 438. That’s a lower of 10 %. The Jacksonville sheriff’s division additionally releases murder data, indicating 112 killings in 2021 and 128 in 2022. That’s up 14 %.
Yes, there have been 3.4 occasions as many killings in New York, however the metropolis is almost 9 occasions as massive. On a population-adjusted foundation, the variety of killings in Jacksonville was about 2.5 occasions that of New York.
In conditions like this, it’s widespread for the particular person criticizing the left’s method to crime to insist that DeSantis isn’t liable for the fee of crime in a metropolis he doesn’t run. This tactic usually works effectively as a result of the mayors of these cities are usually Democrats. It doesn’t work in Jacksonville, although, the place the mayor is Republican Lenny Curry.
DeSantis wasn’t speaking about homicides, in fact. He was speaking about “major crime,” a class for which the Jacksonville sheriff’s division doesn’t launch public data. It’s additionally a class that features issues that aren’t a part of the FBI’s definition of violent crime, like automotive thefts. Under the FBI’s definition of violent crime, the rise in New York was a still-bad 18 %. That’s due largely to a 26 % soar in theft. And, once more, we don’t have data for Jacksonville to check.
So what about Florida’s “50-year low”? As the Tampa Bay Times wrote in December, that’s not as clear-cut as DeSantis wish to declare, being based mostly on the FBI’s incomplete 2021 UCR data. The FBI’s web site warns in opposition to evaluating 2021 data with that of prior years. The Times article additionally quoted specialists saying that “the reported statewide drops in violent crime and property crime in Florida are broadly in line with what the FBI reported nationally based on estimates using the new methodology.”
Since the UCR data are spotty and since New York’s 2021 data are even spottier (partially as a result of the NYPD didn’t contribute utilizing the new system), it’s laborious to check apples-and-apples right here, both. (It’s price noting that New York’s violent crime fee was near its own 50-year-low in 2020.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collects data on deaths from assault, nonetheless, letting us at the very least approximate a comparability on every state’s murder charges. The data for 2022 aren’t full, however the accessible data for each 2021 and 2022 present larger murder totals for Florida than New York. In every year, the population-adjusted fee of murder was 1.5 occasions larger in DeSantis’s state.
Perhaps your response to all of that is to grant DeSantis the good thing about the doubt on his broader argument. After all, theft in New York City was up 26 % in 2022. Was this maybe a perform of the insurance policies of the metropolis’s new district legal professional, who introduced upon taking workplace that he would scale back the variety of arrests for which he’d search jail time? That coverage was shortly rolled again, however conservative media continued to suggest that crime was surging in New York due to his insurance policies. (Often, discussions of rising crime in New York ignored the falling murder fee.) It’s not clear that the two are linked.
It’s additionally not clear if reforms to bail legal guidelines in New York contributed to the enhance in robberies in New York, as some on the proper have urged. Such analyses are made tougher partially by the restricted availability of comparable data elsewhere: If theft elevated in Jacksonville simply as a lot, it could recommend that New York legal guidelines aren’t the drawback.
This is all awfully beneficiant to DeSantis, who’s drawing a direct comparability between the metropolis and his state utilizing data-adjacent rhetoric. In the same means that Fox News sought to create a miasma of concern about crime final yr citing cherry-picked data, DeSantis is attempting to create a way that he’s acquired the solutions on crime — nonetheless little good it did Jacksonville.
We’ll little doubt hear extra about this could DeSantis resolve to run for president, which he could or could not do.
