For close to a decade, the Washington Post published The Watch, a reported opinion column on criminal justice by Radley Balko.
Balko’s work got Cory Maye off death row. He highlighted illegal tactics by prosecutors and malpractice by medical examiners. He was the first journalist to observe the militarization of U.S. policing, culminating in a book titled “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces.” It’s an essential read.
Anyway, Balko is no longer at the Post. Sign up for his Substack. And now, the Post’s criminal justice coverage is … this?
The ‘red state murder problem’? That’s just a Democratic-driven myth.
I’m not a fancy pundit keeping Democracy from Dying in Darkness™ like this guy, but I, personally, would not put murder in scare quotes. During the height of the BLM protests, Contrarians™ never tired of pointing out that advocates for defunding the police had a blind spot about Black crime victims. Now this guy is calling the appalling murder rates in red states a “Democratic-driven myth?”
Marc A. Thiessen’s credentials for writing about crime is having been a speechwriter for George W. Bush. Fair. But a 5-year-old could pull apart the logic of his column, which tries to contest recent research showing that red states have higher rates of violent crime than blue states.
With Republicans hammering them over rising murder rates, Democrats have come up with a new line of defense: Republicans, they claim, are the ones really responsible for the surge in homicides. The United States, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently declared, has a “red state murder problem.”
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates (NOPE)
No, it doesn’t. The bogus claim comes from a March study by the Democratic think tank Third Way, which purports to show that, contrary to “the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.” According to Third Way, of the top 10 states with the highest per-capita murder rates in 2020, eight (Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas) voted for Donald Trump, while just two (New Mexico and Georgia) voted for Joe Biden. “Republicans seem to do a much better job of talking about stopping crime than stopping crime,” Jim Kessler, an author of the report, told Axios.
One problem with that: In most of these red states, the high murder rates are driven by the lethal violence in their blue cities.
It’s the lazy idea that violent crime increases when progressives are in charge (and a corollary to the openly racist idea that violent crime is worse in Black jurisdictions).
First, if you think officials at the city level have much impact on crime rates, Eric Adams and I have a bridge to sell you. The New York City Mayor, who campaigned as a “tough-on-crime” pro-cop candidate now has to answer for the city’s fluctuating crime trends. While homicides are thankfully down (suggesting the spike in killings seen all over the country was driven by everyone going insane during pandemic lockdowns) most other crime is up.
Second, on criminal justice, many city Democrats are actually fervent right-wingers. See: London Breed of San Francisco. You can go to all the gay pride parades you want to burnish your progressive credentials. But if the real estate and tech industries are your primary funders, your primary priority is getting homeless people out of sight.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Substance to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.