Dem
51
GOP
49
While Joe Biden is focused on the criminal behavior of Donald Trump, Trump is focused on the criminal behavior of the American people. As he has been doing for the last 10 years (actually, more like the last 35 years, if you include the Central Park Five), the former president is doing everything he can to paint the U.S. as a criminal wasteland, where nobody is safe. Implicit in this, of course, is the notion that only Trump can fix it. And unanswered, of course, is why Trump didn't fix it in his first term if he's able to do so.
Every year the FBI does a massive data dump of crime statistics, and over the weekend, the Bureau released this year's update. The topline conclusion is that crime is way down, with both violent crimes and property crimes down by double digits.
To be more specific, here's how the Bureau has it by category:
Not all law enforcement agencies report their data (roughly 15% opt out) and, of course, the FBI can't provide data on crimes that were not reported. Nonetheless, violent crime is at a 50-year low, while the drop in the murder rate is the biggest since the FBI began collecting statistics.
We doubt that Biden deserves direct credit for all of this. Maybe some indirect credit, if you believe that the American Recovery Act has reduced poverty/unemployment, since reducing those things tends to reduce crime. But surely the biggest explanation for the drop has to be the winding down of the pandemic. Not only were tensions and unemployment both high during those years, it is also the case that it's a lot easier to obscure one's identity and to get away with certain crimes if everyone is wearing a mask.
The important thing here is that there's no basis for an argument that Biden has unleashed an epidemic of crime on America, because it just isn't so. That is not going to stop Trump from making the claim, of course. And working in Trump's favor here is the unholy synergy between the media and confirmation bias. News outlets do not report on crimes that did not happen, nor on people/businesses who were not victimized. That's dog-bites-man territory. But when they write up violent crime X, or robbery Y, and someone who already believes crime is out of control reads about/sees that, then it seems to confirm what Trump is saying.
Consider, to take one example, a story that was all over the place yesterday, under the headline "Secret Service agent robbed at gunpoint after Biden fundraiser." Several hours after the fundraiser ended, the agent (whose name has been withheld) was in the city of Tustin, which is about 40 miles south of where the fundraiser took place. His bag was taken at gunpoint, he fired at least one shot at the perpetrator, and... that's about all that's known, since the thief has not yet been apprehended.
As chance would have it, (Z) grew up in Tustin and went to high school there. He knows well the spot where the robbery took place. And he can confirm that, as you should surely expect, this incident is an extreme outlier. (Z) was never robbed at gunpoint, nor did he know anyone who was robbed at gunpoint. And even if you wanted to go somewhere and flaunt your diamond rings in hopes of getting robbed (say, to collect the insurance), that would be a lousy place to do it. And yet, there is no question that hundreds of thousands or millions of people heard about this news—which, by the way, is of dubious newsworthiness—and said, "Yep, California is out of control. And crime is out of control." If you have any doubts, read the comments on Fox's version of the story.
In short, when it comes to crime, the facts are on Biden's side, but human cognitive biases definitely are not. This is going to be very tough for the campaign to counter. (Z)