The Patriot Post® · In Brief: 42% of America's Murders Occur in 1% of Democrat Counties
Most Americans know that crime isn’t epidemic in all of our nation’s counties. Journalist Daniel Greenfield makes a compelling case that the real problem is Democrats.
He begins by highlighting the Democrat effort to “spin high crime rates caused by their pro-crime policies” as being “a Republican problem.” Their lackeys in the media are all too happy to run interference. The truth, however, refutes this lie.
Take Oklahoma, for example, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently did. He claimed, “Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s.”
Krugman, who somehow has a Nobel Prize, failed to note that most of the murders were coming out of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt won most of the state while Oklahoma, Tulsa and Cleveland counties however went to leftist Democrat Joy Hofmeister. The ‘blue’ parts of Oklahoma are also red with blood.
“The fact is the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma under your watch,” Hoffmeister had claimed in a viral gubernatorial debate attack. Oklahoma had 287 murders in 2020: 166 came out of Oklahoma County and Tulsa County, the two counties that supported Hoffmeister.
Oklahoma County and Tulsa are two of the 62 counties that were responsible for 56% of America’s murders in 2020. A groundbreaking study by John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, revealed that “1% of counties have 21% of the population and 42% of the murders” and “2% of counties contain 31% of the population and 56% of the murders.”
The 1% of bloody red counties include such Democrat strongholds as Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Dallas, D.C., Miami-Dade, Milwaukee, San Diego, St. Louis, Chicago’s Cook County, Houston’s Harris County, Detroit’s Wayne County, Memphis’ Shelby County, Phoenix’s Maricopa County, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, and many others.
Joe Biden easily won all of those counties, which account for huge percentages of their states’ murders. “There isn’t a red state murder problem,” Greenfield says, “red states have a Democrat crime problem.”
The CPRC study showed that while 2% of counties populated by Democrats were responsible for 56% of the country’s murders, 52% of counties had no murders and 68% of counties had at most one murder.
These numbers clearly show that America is not a violent country, that we do not have a crime problem and that gun culture is not the issue: crime culture in Democrat cities is the issue.
Why is this? Several reasons: Democrat politicians create more criminals by destroying families with government policy. They then cater to the criminals overrunning their cities by either going easy on them or by criticizing and defunding police — problems that got exponentially worse as they fomented division based on racial grievances after the death of George Floyd. This isn’t, contra Krugman, a mystery.
Greenfield concludes:
America could be a safe and pleasant place to live. And the majority of its counties, which are mostly Republican, are. Unfortunately many of its Democrat counties are broken places, packed with broken families, criminal cultures and leftist politicians who pander to the criminals.
And the party and its media cover it up with lies about systemic racism.
As David Horowitz warned in, ‘I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America’, the consequences of these lies is more of the same misery, more crime and more death.