For roughly two decades, the United States enjoyed a marked decline in its crime rates. Burglaries, murders, other violent crimes—they all fell steadily. That promising age ended as 2014 gave way to 2015. For the past two years, crime has been rising. And alarmingly, it is violent crimes—particularly murder—that have led the way.
In 2015, according to FBI data, murders ticked up a statistically significant 11 percent over the previous year. During the same period, assaults were up 5 percent and rapes increased 6 percent. The Brennan Center for Justice has confirmed that the troubling trend continued in 2016. (FBI data for 2016 have yet to be released.) The Brennan Center says murders were up 13.1 percent in 2016; this on top of the double-digit increase in 2015. In a two-year period, murders have risen by a quarter in the United States.
Yet despite this undeniable trend—and the suffering among our fellow citizens that it implies—there is a widespread impulse to minimize and wave away the problem. The reason for this morally noxious denial is no mystery. Donald Trump, both as candidate and now as president, has repeatedly—and correctly—raised the issue of America’s rising murder rate. Because it was Trump who pointed out the facts, legions of liberal “fact checkers” and bloggers have leapt to the conclusion they must not be true.
The self-proclaimed fact-checking outfit PolitiFact was early out of the gate, awarding Trump a “pants on fire” rating in June 2016 for saying that “crime is rising.” PolitiFact, however, cited 2014 data in making its case and, as an American Enterprise Institute scholar pointed out at the time, ignored readily available data on 2015 and early 2016 that showed crime increasing. Yet PolitiFact’s legion of followers was not deterred: Any time Trump mentioned the rising crime rate, “fact checkers,” brandishing outdated charts, called him a liar.
When outright denialism became untenable—the FBI data were irrefutable—the deniers switched tacks. Now, they decided, the crime rise was irrelevant, because it was largely confined to Chicago. “Chicago responsible for rise in U.S. murder rate,” read one typical example, which strongly implied that there is no national crime problem—just a Chicago problem.
First of all, that’s not really true: A recent Wall Street Journal analysis determined that murder is up in 27 of America’s 35 largest cities, and pointed to Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Memphis as cities besides Chicago suffering calamitous murder spikes. But even if it were the case, why would it matter? Do Chicagoans, residents of America’s third-largest metropolis, not count? Imagine similar headlines in 2001 sneering, “Terrorism occurred this year only in New York and Virginia, so therefore it’s no big deal.”
National political leaders on the left, for their part, have simply ignored the problem: To the extent that Hillary Clinton even mentioned crime during her presidential campaign, it was to lament tough policies that her husband had signed into law.
And even if it were true that murders were still on the decline, that wouldn’t change the fact that the United States has a violent crime problem. For one, despite the undeniable progress since the early 1990s, we far outstrip our peer nations in murders. According to United Nations data, our murder rate is more than three times that of France and nearly four times higher than Denmark’s and Australia’s. Americans kill each other at more than 10 times the rate of the Japanese. (But don’t worry, our murder rate is still lower than that of Honduras or South Sudan.)
A new study in the Lancet contains another disturbing finding: By 2030, medical researchers found, America’s life expectancy will be on par with Mexico’s. And this is in part owing to our high murder rate. If enough people are being murdered to affect national life expectancy, you may have a problem. Yet the crime-deniers would have us believe this isn’t a very serious issue.
There are reasons for this denialism beyond the impulse to attribute knavery to anything the president utters. (Were he one day to pronounce the earth round, one would expect a marked increase in the membership of the Flat Earth Society.) Wary of overzealous policing and “mass incarceration,” some worry that fretting about the crime rate will only embolden cops and prosecutors. But this is a mistake: To acknowledge rising crime does not prescribe any form of solution. Indeed, there are myriad theories why murders are rising in the first place. Still others may subscribe to the postmodern relativist notion that “crime” is merely an arbitrary social category designed to keep the underclass oppressed. In this intellectual constellation, to worry about “crime” is to buy into an illegitimate social structure.
But whatever their reasons, by waving away the incontrovertible data, the crime-deniers are effectively saying that victims of crime simply don’t matter. And the ghastliest irony is that the worst hit by crime are the people the left claims to represent: ethnic minorities and the poor. A University of Michigan researcher has found that the average 24-year-old black man in Baltimore has had three close friends or family members murdered. In one bleak four-day period in February, three Chicago children—ethnic minorities all—were shot dead. This is an outrage and a tragedy.
To scoff at this suffering isn’t just wrong. Why, it’s almost criminal.
