Pete Buttigieg dared Americans to look up crime data. I did and it's not pretty for Democrats

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg declared on "Fox News Sunday" this past weekend that Republicans are offering a "false message" about the nation’s crime crisis. He scolded Fox News for "trying to make people think that crime is up when crime is down under Joe Biden and crime was up under Donald Trump." He said this isn’t reported on Fox News, "so if you’re watching this at home, do yourself a favor and look up the data."

While Democrat-paid social media influencers celebrated Buttigieg, he should probably stick to creating electric vehicle propaganda videos for social media. Anyone reviewing the data would know he’s using a politically dishonest statistical sleight of hand--blaming Trump for crime going up thanks to the very policies Democrats instituted, then crime going "down" after the policies were reversed. 

Major cities across the country, mostly run by Democrats, saw a tumultuous period of crime rates spurred by progressive "criminal justice reforms" and police defunding thanks to Democrats who acquiesced to the demands of Black Lives Matter radicals. As I write in my book, "What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities," the result was an unmitigated disaster.

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As police departments were defunded, the nationwide murder rate surged 30% in 2020, making it the largest single-year increase in over a century. The next year, we saw a 4.3% increase in murders nationwide. Prior to the reforms, under Trump, violent crimes were going down.

Leveraging the COVID pandemic as a pretext, Democrats either stopped booking criminals or released them early, claiming they’d face imminent death from COVID if they were to stay locked up. For example, Cornelius Haney was released from prison early over COVID when he was arrested for the murder of a 21-year-old woman in Denver. Two days after Jerry Crawford was released from prison to reduce the spread of COVID, he was arrested for shooting an 18-year-old man to death.

While Buttigieg and other Democrats try to memory-hole reality, we saw a terrifying rise of left-wing political violence perpetrated by activists, including Antifa, with criminals taking advantage of soft-on-crime legislation, such as a ban on police vehicular pursuits in Washington state and downgrading serious felonies by George Soros-backed prosecutors in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. 

When Biden took office, cities like Philadelphia and Indianapolis broke all-time records with 561 homicides and 271 homicides respectively. Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, hit its all-time homicide high in 2022.

It wasn’t just homicides that soared. 

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Overall, crime was on the rise in New York, marked by a historic explosion of assaults hitting nearly 28,000 for the first time in recorded history. Thanks to state law that offers only misdemeanor charges for theft under $950 in value, Los Angeles and San Francisco saw the nation’s top two highest organized retail theft, leading to billions in losses for the city’s business communities. Motor vehicle thefts in 2022 compared to 2019 saw triple digit percentage increases in Denver (179%), Chicago (136%), and St. Louis (109%). Washington state saw an astonishing 10,000% increase in catalytic converter theft between 2019 and 2022. 

Ironically, crimes including murders were undercounted in the aftermath of Democrat criminal justice reforms, thanks to the change in how the FBI collects and reports data. It was missing data from thousand of law enforcement agencies, including those in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.

As crime rates soared, public sentiment shifted towards re-evaluating the efficacy of these reforms. By late 2022, many cities began to rollback these policies and restore funding to their police departments. The reintroduction of these more stringent policing measures and increased police presence led to a noticeable decline in crime rates in 2023-2024. 

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After murders surged by 43% in 2022 compared to 2021, the San Antonio Police Department unveiled a "very simple strategy" by sending officers to proactively police in the neighborhoods with the most 911 calls for violent crimes. After refunding the Portland Police Bureau, the city saw a 22% drop in overall shootings and 23% decrease in homicides in 2023. These strategies were the exact opposite of what Radical Left activists demanded. 

But crime going down from record highs doesn’t mean crime is down to pre-reform levels, which is precisely what Buttiegeg would have you believe.

Annual homicides in Denver dropped 4% in 2023 (with 72). It’s still 14% higher than what it was in 2019 (63). Homicides in Albuquerque saw a 21% dip in 2023 (95). Yet that’s still 86% higher than in 2018 (51). Washington D.C., meanwhile, had more homicides at 274 than in any other year in the two decades. Seattle, where I’m based, experienced a precipitous rise in homicides in 2020, but hit an all-time high in 2023.

The next time Democrats want to celebrate a Biden administration official for dunking on Fox News on Fox News, it would behoove them to have a grasp on the facts, not left-wing talking points better suited to the left-wing echo chamber that is MSNBC. 

The hard truth is that their policies led to unprecedented spikes in crime, and only a return to sensible, stringent policing measures has begun to mitigate the damage inflicted by their ideological missteps. 

Democrats don’t deserve credit when a crisis they created starts to subside after returning to policies that flourished under Trump.

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Jason Rantz, author of "What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities," is a Seattle-based talk show host on KTTH Radio. Follow him on Twitter @JasonRantz.