(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Under Democrats and Biden - Violent Crime has come down [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-17 According to the FBI Violent crime decreased in the United States last year to pre-pandemic levels while property crime increased sharply, the FBI said in a report released on Monday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in an annual report, said violent crime nationwide fell by 1.7 percent in 2022 compared with the previous year. Murder and manslaughter cases were down 6.1 percent after rising in the previous two years, the FBI said, and the number of reported rape cases dropped 5.4 percent. Aggravated assault decreased by 1.1 percent, but robbery was up by 1.3 percent. Property crimes -- mainly car-jackings and theft -- were up 7.1 percent. The FBI also reported hate crime statistics for last year -- incidents involving race, religion and sexual-orientation. Hate crimes rose by less than one percent last year over the previous year, with anti-Black, anti-Jewish and anti-gay male incidents topping each category. The hate crime statistics drew the attention of the White House, which noted that anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 25 percent in 2022 to account for over half of all reported religion-based hate crimes. "The data is a reminder that hate never goes away, it only hides," President Joe Biden said in a statement. "Any hate crime is a stain on the soul of America." Violent crime is down. Somehow, I think Fox News won’t be reporting this where the narrative is that crime is rampant in “Democrat Cities” as a result of the “Defund the Police” initiatives. Oh, and for the record homicides in Portland are down slightly. Portland’s homicide numbers were slightly down as of May, mirroring national trends. There were 36 homicides in the first five months of this year, compared to 39 during the same period in 2022. At a routine press briefing Tuesday, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt highlighted more reasons for optimism that the recent wave of violence in Portland may be receding. The city has seen a 14% decline in homicides with guns. Gresham had an even sharper decline, from seven homicides to one. Then there’s Jesse Watters ranting about crime in DC. “That’s what happens when it’s all crime and no punishment, DC didn’t prosecute 67% of those arrested due to defund the police.” Ok, um, but then who did the arresting? This sounds more like the prosecutors were defunded, not the police. And actually, DC Police really weren’t defunded by much. WASHINGTON — Nationwide calls to “Defund the Police” shined a spotlight on police budgets across the country, including here in Washington, D.C. In June 2020, local news headlines from multiple outlets in the District proclaimed that the DC Council was “cutting $15 million from DC Police budget.”QUESTION: Did DC Police really get its budget cut by millions of dollars this year? SOURCES: DC Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety’s 2021 Budget Report DC Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit public policy think tank in the District ANSWER: Over the summer, Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed a $578 million operating budget for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). But DC Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, which oversees MPD spending, cut more than $9.5 million from that, recommending DC Police get a roughly $568 million operating budget in fiscal year 2021. So yes, that operating budget is almost $10 million less than Bowser proposed for DC Police. If you add in proposed cuts to MPD’s capital budget, the overall proposed budget approved by the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety cut roughly $15 million from Mayor Bowser's proposed police budget for the upcoming year. But when you break it down dollar for dollar, the $568 million operating budget recommended by that oversight committee was actually more than MPD’s approved operating budget the previous year, which was $559 million. $15 Million was cut from what Mayor Bowser proposed, but that was still $9 higher than what had been approved for the previous year. In order words rather than a budget increase of $24 Million, the police only received a budget increase of $9 Million. Oh, how horribly they’ve been “defunded.” This narrative is a crock. Most police departments have not been defunded. ABC Owned Television Stations examined the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties and found 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019. [...] Dr. Rashawn Ray, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told KABC in Los Angeles that the false narrative has held up because of that repetition by public officials. "Overwhelmingly, cities, counties, [and] police departments across the country are not being defunded in any way," Ray said. "In fact, many of them have increased their budgets. Part of the reason why the defund the police narrative has stayed around is because police officers say it and elected officials say it." Direct funding of police does not have a commensurate impact on crime. Even if the cuts were real, the premise that lower police spending leads to increased crime (or the other way around) is counter to decades of evidence, according to public data and criminal justice experts. An ABC OTV analysis of state and local police funding and violent crime data in the U.S. overall between 1985 and 2020 found no relationship between year-to-year police spending and crime rates. (An analysis by the Washington Post found similar results from 1960 to 2018.) Further analysis of Los Angeles County's own crime data show violent crime numbers don't move up or down with any relationship to money spent on law enforcement or the number of officers on patrol. Kimberly Dodson, a retired law enforcement officer who is now a criminologist at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said that's because police mostly react to crime. "Crime happens. Somebody calls the police, and they come and take a report. Then, they try to solve the crime after the fact, right? So, saying that the police deter crime is not actually accurate. Because they're more of a reactive agency," Dodson told KTRK in Houston. She said one reason police agencies feel stretched is because communities have been asking them to "be all things to everybody. And that doesn't seem fair." Just one more point before I’m done — violent crime is not a problem exclusive to large cities. The fact is that rural communities have violent crime also, and generally they have a much higher rate of it particularly when it comes to gun crimes. As gun violence continues to fuel violent crime, some conservative politicians are not only refusing to support violence prevention measures but are also rolling back gun laws. Many of these same officials express the narrative that gun violence is only a problem in urban, Democrat-led cities, and media outlets focus on gun violence in cities like Chicago. The truth is that rural communities—particularly in red states—have increasingly faced levels of gun violence that match or outpace urban areas, says the Center for American Progress. Rural communities are experiencing high rates of gun violence. From 2016 to 2020, the two U.S. counties to experience the most gun homicides per capita were rural, Phillips County, Ar., with 55.45 age-adjusted homicides per 100,000 people, and Lowndes County, Al., with 48.36 age-adjusted homicides per 100,000. During the same years, 13 of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita were rural. Some 80 percent of these 20 counties are in states that received an “F” grade for their weak gun laws, say the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2021 annual state scorecard rankings. Overall, the total gun death rate for rural communities—when age-adjusted per 100,000 people—was 40 percent higher than it was for large metropolitan areas in 2020. The causes of crime and violence can be a complicated mix. A stew of morality mixed with desperation, education, poverty and links to the community. There can be a deficit in one or all of these areas whether someone lives in a city or doesn’t. Building a society that minimizes the impact of all these affects should be our goal. So police may not be the be-all-end-all solution to crime since they tend to show up after the crime is already over. We should grade them on their ability to solve the crime, not prevent it. Greater spending on police does not bring the crime rate down, however, there is a very clear and direct link between lax gun laws and gun crimes. More people possessing guns tends to lead to more people using those guns in crime and on themselves in suicides. The GOP narratives are wrong. I recently argued with a MAGA over the issue of crime in “Democrat Cities” and even after I repeatedly showed him the crime rates are higher in Red States and rural communities he came back with “There’s bulletproof glass at the McDonald’s in Compton.” I grew up in a community like that so I have some thoughts. Well, that happens to have been a community where there has been a deficit of opportunity and education for generations. Communities like that were artificially manufactured dumping grounds in which minorities were RedLined and trapped within then deprived of public services and a better chance to survive and thrive. People there have been treated like shit, and they feel like they have no responsibility to treat anyone else better than they’ve been treated. They’re mired in hopelessness and living in a deficit of empathy. And they have guns, lots of guns -— consequently, the McDonald’s has bulletproof glass. That may not be the case in some small town, but then again the chance of getting shot and killed is can actually be higher in that small town than in a city. 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