GOP tweet misfires in linking crime trends to Democratic policies

Republicans see a winning issue in linking crime to Democratic policies.

When homicides spiked in the second half of 2020, President Donald Trump wielded it as a campaign issue, saying Republicans would restore order to crime-ridden Democratic-led cities.

He lost his race, but the GOP attacks continue. In a recent tweet, the Republican National Committee blamed rising crime on Democrats.

"Crime is escalating to a level we haven’t seen in decades as a direct result of Democrats’ defund the police movement and Biden-Harris open-border policies," Republicans tweeted June 29.

We asked the RNC for the data behind the claims in the tweet. Their response included nothing on the link to police defunding. On the open border part, they pointed to news coverage about an increase in fentanyl seizures at the border, high-speed chases in South Texas, and FBI director Christopher Wray talking about an epidemic of drug smuggling and other illegal activity at the border. 

The RNC tweet is rife with inaccuracies. But its biggest flaw is the unfounded assertion that crime rate trends were a "direct result" of Democratic policies.

Homicides increased in 2020. It’s possible that the toll could have topped 19,000 last year. 

But the RNC tweet is not narrowly about rising homicides. It encompasses several other claims that are flawed:

"Open-border policies": The articles the RNC cited said nothing linking activity at the border to a spike in the national incidence of murders or other crimes. We found no independent research that argued that point.

Criminologist and law professor Paul Cassell at the University of Utah noted that when murders began to increase rapidly in mid-2020, immigration was stable or declining.

"And, obviously, Democrats did not control immigration policy in May 2020," Cassell said. "So any linkage between the 2020 homicide increase and immigration policies seems quite dubious."

Historic highs: The RNC tweet talked about crime reaching levels not seen in decades. Not only do they lack the data to confirm that, but based on the FBI’s latest available data for homicides and other preliminary data, the U.S. is not on pace to reach the heights seen in the mid-1990s. 

"Defund the police": The RNC tweet suggested that "defund the police" is a core Democratic policy. It is not. A handful of Democrats have spoken out for it, but during the 2020 campaign, candidate Joe Biden rejected the movement. And his 2022 budget requested an increase of $304 million for police to build ties within the communities they patrol.

Some Democratic-led cities did cut police budgets last year, but not many. Among the 50 largest cities, police spending as a percentage of general expenditures went up an average of 13.7%. At least 24 cities increased police funding for 2021.

The RNC tweet speaks of crime broadly, but it’s homicides in particular that have caused alarm since a sharp rise in the summer of 2020. That coincided with the anti-police-violence protests that spread across the country in June following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The calls to defund the police gained prominence the same month.

One problem in talking about crime at this moment is that no one yet has a national picture of crime for 2020, let alone the first half of 2021. The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report is the most comprehensive data set, and the FBI hasn’t published the 2020 edition yet. 

Other data sets lack the scope of the FBI’s full assessment, but they all point in the same direction: Homicides are up.

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A preliminary FBI crime report for 154 cities says murders rose 10% in the first quarter of 2021 compared with a year earlier. The Major Cities Chiefs Association found a 29% rise in homicides for 63 cities in the first quarter of 2021. And the latest report from Council on Criminal Justice, an independent source of crime data, looked at 24 cities and found homicides rose by 24% in the first quarter.

The topline numbers don’t tell the whole story, however.

For example, in the first-quarter FBI release on 154 cities, the increase in homicides was concentrated in 40% of the cities. The remaining 60% saw murders drop or stay the same. As for violent crime generally — including homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — the number remained just about the same across the full group of cities, undercutting the RNC’s broad-brush claim about escalating crime.

The Council on Criminal Justice’s data on weekly police reports found that homicide rates generally fell after October 2020 — from a bit over 5 deaths per 100,000 to about 3 per 100,000 by March 2021.

That could reflect seasonal changes; homicides tend to fall in the cooler months. But the report’s authors say other unknown factors could be at work.

The RNC’s claim that rising crime was a "direct result" of Democratic policies lacks evidence, and experts say it ignores some of the major events of 2020 that also likely had an effect on crime.

"The pandemic hit especially hard in exactly those neighborhoods where a lot of violence happens anyway," said City University of New York criminologist Candace McCoy. "Services that connect with teens were shutting down. Families were hit with people getting sick, some of them dying. More young adults were left to themselves."

Criminologist Eileen Ahlin at Penn State-Harrisburg noted that the economic downturn also mattered.

"Unemployment and declining mental health routinely affect crime rates," Ahlin said. "Last year we saw both at play." 

On top of the pandemic and the disruptions it brought, there were the nationwide protests spurred by the death of George Floyd.

Cassell at the University of Utah said that played a role, because it made police less likely to engage with people who might commit violence.

"Police pulled back from the kinds of aggressive steps that are often needed to most effectively fight homicides," Cassell said.

Cassell also said that dealing with marches could have taken police away from other activities. Researchers disagree whether the protests themselves had any effect. Regardless, Cassell called the GOP link between crime and a defund policy "dubious." 

Even the pandemic and the protests might not fully explain the trend in homicides. As the Council on Criminal Justice report noted, the "homicide increase actually began in 2019, prior to the pandemic and well before protests against police violence spread across the country."

Looking at the first three months of 2020, murders rose 20% from a year earlier. The pandemic shutdown didn’t take place until mid-March, and the protests didn’t begin until late May.

The Republican National Committee tweeted that "crime is escalating to a level we haven’t seen in decades as a direct result of Democrats’ defund the police movement and Biden-Harris open-border policies."

It’s not true that crime is rising to a level we haven’t seen in decades. 

Homicides are up, but there’s no evidence that the trend is tied to a police defunding policy or Democrats’ border policies, let alone that it’s a "direct result."

Experts say many other factors may have played a role, including racial-justice protests and disruptions caused by the pandemic. 

We rate this claim False.