Republicans and the crime issue
Here’s the good news about the shooting outside the home of Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) on Sunday: Unlike the attacker who tried to stab him this summer, the assailants apparently were not trying to kill him. The shooting was a drive-by unrelated to his gubernatorial campaign. But the fact that there was a drive-by shooting in the quiet suburban neighborhood where Zeldin lives highlights why crime has become such a potent issue in the midterm elections.
Shirley, Long Island, isn’t exactly Fort Apache, the Bronx. The leafy Suffolk County hamlet has a median home value of $413,900, a median income of $105,362 and a poverty rate of 6.1 percent. Yet bullets were flying outside Zeldin’s home, leaving two people lying with gunshot wounds in the bushes in front of his porch. “One of the bullets landed about 30 feet from where the girls were doing homework,” Zeldin says. “We had to go through crime scene tape, were getting advised where to walk so that we weren’t stepping on blood.”
Shootings such as these were once contained in certain high crime neighborhoods. No longer. Crime is everywhere. The week before, a Long Island dad visiting his child at college was shot and killed at a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Marriott hotel. Last Thursday alone, there were three subway knife attacks in New York — one of them fatal. The violence has left New Yorkers rattled: 75 percent say they are personally worried about being a victim of violent crime, and 70 percent say they feel less safe than before the pandemic. And they aren’t the only ones. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that 80 percent of Americans say they are worried about crime, and a 53 percent majority says they worry “a great deal” — including 58 percent of city residents, 46 percent in the suburbs, and 51 percent in rural areas. According to Gallup, crime ranks third in people’s concerns, behind only inflation and the economy.
Americans have good reason to be concerned. According to the FBI, the murder rate across the United States rose 4.3 percent in 2021 relative to 2020, when homicides rose 29 percent — the largest one-year jump ever. Some have bizarrely suggested that this represents an improvement, and that talk of a crime surge in American cities is little more than a Fox News creation. No, it’s not. The murder numbers are cumulative. The record-breaking homicide rate in 2020 did not recede to pre-pandemic levels in 2021; it continued and got even worse — effectively wiping out two decades’ worth of declines in deadly violence. To suggest this is an improvement is like telling a Florida community that saw a record storm surge that an additional four-inch rise in floodwaters is an improvement. There is no “improvement” until the waters have receded.
According to the FBI data, there were more murders in the United States in 2021 than in any year since 1994. And Axios reports that the FBI numbers might in fact be low because law enforcement agencies significantly underreported crime data to the agency, leaving roughly “2.1 million crimes in the U.S. … uncounted due to the lack of reporting.” Crime has gotten so bad that Starbucks recently announced it was shuttering 16 locations in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., over safety concerns.
Yet, in the midst of this crime wave, Democrats in key swing states are running on a platform of letting violent criminals out of prison. In Wisconsin, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes was caught on tape saying that releasing criminals “is now sexy.” He wants to cut the prison population in half. His Republican opponent, incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, has hammered Barnes on rising crime in cities such as Milwaukee, where homicides are up 40 percent. And after trailing in every poll this summer, Johnson has opened up a 2.7-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average.
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Democrats turn them loose policies have been responsible for crime sprees in many Democrat-controlled areas. The Democrats should have to pay a political price for the results of their soft-on-crime policies. What is clear is that these policies have resulted in more crime.
See, also:
More than 235 people have resigned from Kim Foxx's office since July 2021
And:
CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and more sound alarm on midterm backlash against Democrats over crime
52% of Americans said they trust Republicans on crime versus 38% for Democrats, according to a recent poll
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