Yet Again, Debunking the Crime Myths

Based on recent socio-political events, it seems we'll be doing this again.

• There is no data supporting the claim that " Crime here (in the United States) is up and through the roof."  Violent crime is down in the United States - "At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall," said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics." In June 2024, FBI released data indicated that, compared to the first five months of 2023, murders this year have dropped more than 40% in American cities. This also was true for other violent crime categories; Reported rapes (down 25.7%), Aggravated assaults (down 12.5%), Robberies (17.8%), Property crimes (down 15.1%), Burglaries (down 16.7%), and Motor vehicle theft (down 17.3%).

• There is no data supporting the claim that crime "has taken a “new form” as “migrant crime.” In fact, there is more evidence to date that immigrants are less likely to be imprisoned than U.S.-born individuals. The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research released a study in 2023 that found that has been the case in America for the last 140 years. Immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white, the study finds. And when the analysis is expanded to include Black Americans — whose prison rates are higher than the general population — the likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is 60 percent lower than of people born in the United States.

Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky; "“Recent waves of immigrants are more likely to be employed, married with children, and in good health. Far from the rapists and drug dealers that anti-immigrant politicians claim them to be, immigrants today are doing relatively well and have largely been shielded from the social and economic forces that have negatively affected low-educated U.S.-born men.”

Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.

In 1920, the targets of anti-immigration hatred were European, not Central and South American, but were no less targets of the racial and religious bigotry of the era. The newcomers from Italy, Greece and Eastern Europe were considered inferior - dirtier, less intelligent, more criminally inclined - than Americans of northern European and Anglo-Saxon descent.

The racist stereotypes at the heart of anti-immigrant hatred are no more true today than they were a century ago, but bigots and extremists still cling to them just as tightly.

Second verse, same as the first. Don't buy it. It's a lie designed to scare you. Worse, it calls to the othering and dehumanizing nature at the heart of racism, and people who know better actively use those fear-based lies to advance regressive and racist policy that punish historically marginalized communities.

Do not let them succeed.

You can read "Trump says crime is soaring, and immigrants are to blame. The data tell another story" from today's Los Angeles Times.