Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Quote of the Day

You always see stories about the midterm politics, saying that Republicans are going to tie Democrats to the high crime rate. The unquestioned assumption is that there is now a high crime rate.

The fact is that crime went down last year, according to FBI statistics. We’re not in a crime wave. The crime is ebbing. And, historically, crime is at about half the rate that it was in 1991, which I don’t think people look back on as a Road Warrior-like post-apocalyptic landscape.

And, historically, we’re seeing relatively low crime rates, but because Republicans would like to “tie Democrats to high crime rate,” that is what the media are describing the crime rate as being. And once that frame has been put into place, it’s very hard to get out of it.



Related Off-site Links:
Republicans Say Crime Is On the Rise – What Is the Crime Rate and What Does It Mean? – Justin Nix (The Conversation, October 24, 2022).
U.S. Crime: Is America Seeing a Surge in Violence? – Jake Horton (BBC News, October 24, 2022).
What’s Really Going On With the Crime Rate? – Ronald Brownstein (The Atlantic, October 20, 2022).

UPDATE: Stories About Crime Are Rife With Misinformation and Racism, Critics Say – Sandhya Dirks (NPR News, November 8, 2022).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• An Essential Read Ahead of the Midterms
• Historian Nancy MacLean: The Threat to American Democracy Is at “Red-Alert”
• “Come for the Racism, Stay for the Autocracy”
• William D. Lindsey: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2022
• Heather Cox Richardson: It’s Up to Us to Prove That Democracy Is Still a Viable Form of Government
• Republicans Pose an “Existential Threat” to American Democracy
• The Big Switch
• The Republican Party in a Nutshell
• Republicans Don’t Care About American Democracy
• Heather Cox Richardson on Combating the Republican Party’s “Rigging of the System”

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