Joe Biden, Leading the Fight Against Violent Crime, and Other Fables

Paul has noted that the MSM has started to pump for Biden, viewing him as the best chance for the Democrats to hold the White House in 2024 (and, given the alternatives, who can blame them?).

As if on cue, the NYT last week brought us this story, titled, “A drop in murders this year exemplifies the kind of news story that can get relatively little attention.” Here’s how it starts:

Good news in 2022

At the start of this year, America’s crime trends looked grim: Murders had spiked at a record speed in 2020 and increased further in 2021.

But now that the year is ending, it’s clear that the violence has eased.

Murders in large U.S. cities are down more than 5 percent so far in 2022 compared to the same time last year, according to the research firm AH Datalytics. Gun deaths, injuries and mass shootings are also down this year.

See anything missing? There are a couple of things, actually. One is the actual number of murders nationwide in 2022; what we get (if you click on the link, which most people don’t) is the number only for “large cities.” The even more obvious missing item is the historical context, something the NYT usually insists upon. But fear not, you’ve come to the right place. The information is here at Macrotrends; its graph is particularly useful. What we see is that, even with 2022’s slight decline in murder, the murder rate now, with last year’s sole exception, is higher than it’s been for 20 years, and 50% higher than it was at its modern low point just nine years ago in 2014.

Of course this is not how the Times frames it. A more accurate setting for its piece might be, “After a generational one-year spike in murder during President Biden’s first twelve months in office, homicide declined slightly in 2022 to the point that the country now has lost only 20, rather than almost 25, years of progress against violent crime, progress that began in 1992 under President George H. W. Bush.”

But wait, there’s more (as there always is with the Times):

What happened? To regular readers of this newsletter, the explanations may be familiar: The causes of the murder spike have receded.

Covid disrupted much of life in 2020 and 2021, including social services that help keep people safe. That applies not just to policing, but also to places like schools and addiction treatment facilities that can help people — especially young men, the more common perpetrators and victims of violent crime — stay out of trouble. As life slowly returns to normal, these programs have reopened and helped suppress murders and shootings.

Notice how policing gets gently shuffled into the corner, in favor of “schools and addiction treatment facilities.” And note too the emphasis on COVID, the Left’s all-purpose excuse for whatever has gone wrong.

But the Times isn’t finished.

We also have additional distance from the murder of George Floyd in 2020, an event that not only spawned widespread protests but also strained police-community trust across the U.S.

How did the fallout from the horror of Floyd’s death tie into murder trends? Because those police-community tensions may have reduced law enforcement’s effectiveness by, for example, making people more skeptical of working with the police and leading officers to be too cautious in fighting crime. And the public’s loss of confidence in the police may have led more people to resolve conflicts through their own means, including violence, instead of through the justice system. The passage of time and efforts to repair trust have diminished those effects.

So, according to the Times, the killing of George Floyd and (consequent?) distrust of the police caused the steep rise in murder.

Where to start? Social protest may well be caused by instances of police brutality, but murder is caused by the same things as ever: Greed, jealously, revenge, hate, sadism, lust and romantic rivalry, and the desire for power and to control. All this is pretty well known, but if you want corroboration, see, e.g., this source and this. But to the Times (and liberals in general) murder is never caused by the personal attributes of the killer. Killers and other criminals are not the source of what they do; it’s always some “root cause” somewhere over there. Criminals aren’t actors; they are mere passive vessels of adverse social forces dumped into them by someone or something else (such as capitalism, racism, poverty, Donald Trump or the Second Amendment). This is the real reason that, in liberal lore, the death penalty, or any other serious punishment for that matter, is verbotten.

But apart from that, there are just the basic facts the Times’ reporter wildly misstates. To start with, Americans on the whole trust the police: Gallup reports that 53% have a high or very high regard for the cops, while 32% rate them as average, and only 15% have a low or very low opinion of them. (By telling contrast, news reporters are viewed with high or very high regard by 17% — less than a third of the number for the police — and are held in low esteem by 43%, almost three times the number who doubt law enforcement officers. Of course this does not stop reporters from writing in tongue-clucking tones about the supposedly perceived ethical deficiencies of police).

But what of black people in particular, you might ask. It’s a fair question, since blacks by grossly disproportionate numbers both commit murder and are murder victims.

That question too has been polled, and the results were reported late last year by the Washington Examiner:

A poll that shows ridiculously low support from black voters for defunding the police should be the final nail in the coffin for Democrats' anti-law and order campaign of the last seven years.

TheGrio.com commissioned a poll, along with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that 82% of black respondents want police funding either to be kept about the same (48%) or increased (34%). Only 17% wanted it decreased.

This is consistent with other polling I’ve seen that has found that a huge majority of blacks (slightly over 80%) want either the same police presence they have now in their neighborhoods or more. Fewer than a fifth want less.

If you go into most black neighborhoods and talk about defunding the police, they'll look at you "like you're the craziest person on the planet." But it's one thing for a white, conservative Republican to say it — it's far more important to hear black respondents in a poll confirm it overwhelmingly.

We have pointed it out here again and again and again . In any given year, the police shoot and kill less than 20 unarmed black men, according to the Washington Post database of police shootings . This year, it's only six so far.

That it is even that many is a tragedy, but it's also a very low number, signifying an event that is extremely rare in a population of 330 million.

The sum of it is that, while we can all be happy about the decrease in murder last year, slight though it is, it’s hardly the chipper story the Times would have us believe, and still less the (only mildly disguised) campaign piece for Joe Biden the Times is trying to sell.