Keystone Today

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made claims that the U.S. is in the midst of a surge of violent crimes, stemming from FBI crime data and survey data showing a murder rate increase in 2021.

Sessions had an op-ed published in the Oct. 5 edition of the New York Post, where he attributed the increase in crime to politicians and specifically to Democratic policies. 

“Tragically, they (Democrats) ignored the warnings of law-enforcement officials and abandoned policies shown to work, replacing them with naïveté and wishful thinking,” Sessions wrote in the op-ed. “The results are now clear for all to see. New FBI statistics show that our nation is suffering a historic surge in violent crime — one that was entirely predictable. From 2019 to 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by an astounding 27%, the largest annual increase in at least the past 100 years. This spike is so far off the charts, it’s hard to fathom.” 

FBI Crime Data Explorer reported that In 2019 there were 448,783 violent crime incidents and 520,209 offenses reported by 9,042 law enforcement agencies across the country. In 2021, this number increased to 694,050 violent crimes and 817,020 offenses reported by 11,794 law enforcement agencies. In 2019, in Pennsylvania, the data lists 105 violent crime incidents and 108 offenses reported by 26 Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies. This number increased drastically in 2021, with 13,274 violent crime incidents and 14,230 offenses reported by 40 Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies.

Despite these figures, U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman (D-PA) has advocated for the release of second-degree murderers, comments his campaign recently walked back. Fox News cites Fetterman's record as lieutenant governor and head of the Board of Pardons (BOP) in Pennsylvania in a report published on Sept. 20. The report said that Fetterman called for the release of second-degree murderers and called it "mercy for the deserving and rehabilitated.”

“I hope that it could lead to a conversation that would free close to 1,200 people of a legacy that never made sense, that encompasses victims' input, encompasses their conduct and behavior in prison," Fetterman said, according to Fox News.

Some experts see the GOP taking the House and Senate because of the recent rise in crime, and polls have also indicated this. In a report by Reuters on Oct. 5, polls show that Republicans have an upper hand in the midterm elections due to high crime rates in Democrat-controlled cities. The poll surveyed 4,415 U.S. adults between Sept. 27 and Oct. 3, and found that 39% of registered voters would choose a Republican to “solve crime,” compared to 30% who would choose a Democrat. Top issues on the ballot are inflation, the economy, immigration and crime. 

Republican strategist Alex Conant told Reuters, "A lot of voters care about crime, and a lot of voters care about immigration… Right now, those are winning issues for Republicans."

Reuters notes that some cities have seen murder rates fall slightly in the first half of 2022, but robberies and assaults are both up. The poll also showed that women who live in suburban areas said they favor Republicans on crime by eight points.

On Oct. 4, City Journal’s Jeffrey Anderson published an article showing the findings of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which is the largest crime survey in the country. Anderson is the president of American Main Street Initiative and was the director of the BJS at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.

The data presented shows there has been an increase of 29% of violent crime in cities and urban areas between 2020 and 2021, according to NCVS. Rural and suburban area crime remained relatively the same. The survey also shows violent crime victims increased from 19 to 24.5 people per 1,000. In urban areas between 2018 and 2020, the violent crime rate was between 29 and 42% higher than rural areas. In 2021 the NCVS reported this number went up 121%.

"The property-crime rate in urban areas was nearly twice as high in 2021 as in suburban areas (157.5 to 86.8 victimizations per 1,000 households) and nearly three times as high as in rural areas," City Journal says.

The City Journal reports says that the 27% increase in murder in 2020 is the highest crime increase in more than a century. The report says that the data is not as reliable due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however. The rise in violent crime isn’t random but could be the result of ignorance of the “broken windows” theory, which according to Britannica, involves the idea that ignoring minor crimes (like broken windows) leads to more serious crimes, especially in an urban environment.

In the New York Post op-ed, Sessions argues that the big cities, with the largest increase in crime, have abandoned their police and cited an FBI statistic showing that arrests dropped 25% in 2020, coinciding with the 27% increase in murders. The op-ed said Portland homicides tripled from 2016 to 2020 and are on the rise, and that Sessions says Portland sees a homicide every four days on average. In Minneapolis and New York, homicides have almost doubled since 2019. Sessions blames “the left” and says that “woke policies make America more dangerous.”