Facing a recall campaign from residents upset about crime, Oakland Mayor Sheng Tao released data this April purporting to show that crime was down in his city by 33%. This number was quickly embraced by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who claimed his decision to send the California Highway Patrol into the city was paying off, and the story was dutifully reported without examination by local media.
But the numbers are all lies. First noted by a citizen activist and then confirmed by the San Francisco Chronicle, it turns out the Oakland Police Department compared fully counted crime data from 2023 to partially counted data from 2024. The crime drop wasn’t real. It was crass false accounting.
This is just a token of the lies Democrats tell about crime. Following the June 27 exposure of the biggest political lie of this generation, that President Joe Biden is sharp as a tack and fit for the office of president, the Washington Examiner asked, “What else are the Democrats lying about?” In the coming weeks, we will provide some answers to that question in a series of editorials exploring a range of blue party falsehoods. All the lies are purposeful efforts to dupe voters, treat them as fools, and secure reelection to continue ruining America and its states and cities with abjectly incompetent and often malevolent government.
The authorities in Washington maintain two data series on crime: the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s National Crime Victimization Survey. The FBI data, in theory, track every crime reported to local police departments. The DOJ survey bypasses law enforcement and goes straight to the people, reaching 240,000 respondents every year (for comparison’s sake, an average presidential horse race poll only reaches about 2,000 people).
For decades, these two data series largely confirmed each other, demonstrating that each was fairly accurate. When crime went up or down in the FBI numbers, it went in the same direction in the DOJ numbers. But then something changed in 2021 after President Joe Biden entered the White House. The FBI numbers started to report much lower levels of crime than the DOJ. Part of this is almost certainly due to new onerous requirements the FBI put on local law enforcement. As a result of a new and cumbersome reporting system, far fewer departments submit data. In 2019, 89% of local entities covering 97% of the population did so, but in 2021, just 63% covering 65% of the population did so. Large cities controlled by Democrats, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, all failed to submit any data at all.
The FBI data pick up crime only when it is reported to police. In San Francisco, many retailers have stopped reporting thefts entirely because there is no point. The police will not catch the thieves, and left-wing prosecutors refuse to prosecute. In some cases, Democrats even threaten the populace to dissuade them from reporting crimes. A Target store in Sacramento was threatened with a nuisance violation if it continued to report thefts from the store. No wonder crime is officially down in Newsom’s California.
But it is, in truth, much higher than it was, as all of us can tell from our experiences and those of people we know.
According to the latest Gallup poll, 92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats think crime is increasing. But the FBI claims it is falling. Not so, says the DOJ. According to the latest DOJ numbers , the violent victimization rate rose 40% from 2021 to 2022. That same DOJ report found that in 2022, just 42% of violent victimizations were reported to police.
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For over a decade, the Democratic Party has thrown its lot in with George Soros and the pro-criminal prosecutors he funds through his “Color of Change” activist organization. Not to be outdone, Biden has turned the southern border into a turnstile releasing millions of violent crime-committing illegal immigrants into the country.
The public rightfully feels that Biden and the Democrats have not restored order from the lawlessness of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Democrats can cherry-pick and manipulate crime statistics to make the case that crime is down, but voters won’t believe them, nor should they. For it is a massive Democratic lie.
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