This is a strange column in the Washington Post. It argues that Trump is wrong when he asserts that most major crime occurs in Democratic Party run cities. Then it lists data and details that confirm that Trump is correct. Strange! But is Trump right?
The Washington Post headline reads:
Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.
Over and over, Trump has shared that terse phrase with his tens of millions of Twitter followers, including on Wednesday and Thursday. And over and over, he has tried to imply that Democrats broadly and former vice president Joe Bidenspecifically are soft on crime. That his likely general election opponent and other leaders in the Democratic Party are happy to have social structures collapse into anarchy for some unclear reason.
To make that case, Trump has repeatedly lifted up a statistical factoid, as he did during an event at the White House on Wednesday.
“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” he said. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of 20. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.”
Lot’s of Democratic Party blue there, don’t you think??
Here’s the “money” line:
Trump would no doubt shrug at that detail, decrying as “fake news” the revelation that his assertion was only slightly wrong. And, in fairness, it actually doesn’t matter that four of the 32 cities listed above have non-Democratic mayors — because it doesn’t really matter that the other mayors are Democrats.
It’s not clear how Trump is defining “most dangerous” in this context. So let’s look at two related sets of data compiled by the FBI: most violent crime and most violent crime per capita.
The most recent data to that effect is from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report covering the first half of 2019. The cities with the most violent crimes are many of the most populous cities in the country, as you might expect. Those with the highest rates of violent crime are from a range of different states.
Most of the current mayors of these cities are Democrats. Two of the mayors of cities with the most reported violent crimes overall, though, are independents and one, the mayor of Jacksonville, Fla., is a Republican. Among the 20 cities with the most violent crime per capita, one isn’t a Democrat: the independent mayor of Springfield, Mo.
It is increasingly clear that the media is no longer even remotely credible. It’s sad & pathetic. And bad for America.