One after another, Republican leaders painted a grim picture of America from the stage of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday, suggesting the nation is awash in violent crime fueled by an “invasion” of “illegal aliens” and “Chinese fentanyl” at the southern border.
Echoing many of the night’s other speakers, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Republicans were the “law and order team” while President Biden and Democrats, determined to achieve a “borderless and lawless” future, were responsible for the “dramatic increases” in violence and drugs in the country.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said that “every day” illegal immigrants allowed into the country by Democrats kill and rape Americans. “Every day,” the crowd chanted in unison.
The crime landscape in the United States is far more nuanced than suggested, according to federal and state data, which vary across the country and from city to city.
For example, in January Los Angeles officials touted a big drop in violent crime in 2023 compared with the previous year: Murders were down 17% and shootings were down 10%, according to LAPD data.
But last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would quadruple the number of California Highway Patrol shifts in Oakland, where city data last year showed violent crime was up 21%, robbery was up 38% and vehicle theft was up 43%.
The clearest recent trend in national crime data (which Democrats have cited to refute Republican claims and which Republicans dismiss as misleading) is that violent crime has declined.
Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics, has studied national crime trends for years. In an interview with The Times, he said Republican arguments about rising violent crime “would have been better in 2021 and 2022 than in 2023 and 2024.”
Violent crime, including homicides, rose — and substantially — in those early years amid the social upheaval associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. But Asher said there has been a clear decline in the two most recent years, according to available federal data and state-by-state figures he has compiled.
“All the data we have points to the fact that, especially when it comes to murders, there was a really big drop last year,” Asher said, and “so far this year, an even bigger drop.”
The declines “are not everywhere, but across a large swath of American cities” and “in some places, back to pre-COVID levels,” he said.
“Reasonable people can disagree about who should get the credit, what is the cause, which policies work and which don’t, and in which cases it is a fluke,” Asher said. “However, the evidence that gun violence and murder are declining in the United States is incontrovertible.”
Declines in both blue and red states are helping to improve the national picture, Asher said.
California recorded 1,892 homicides in 2023, which was “roughly in line” with annual numbers seen between 2016 and 2019, and well below the state’s all-time high for homicides and its levels during the peak of the pandemic.
In 1992, there were 1,092 homicides in the city of Los Angeles alone. In 2022, there were 392. In 2023, there were 327.
In 2019, there were 253 homicides in Los Angeles, so the recent decline has not yet returned the city to its pre-COVID levels of violence.
As for crimes committed by immigrants, Cruz and others cited a handful of specific cases to bolster the claim that such incidents are common.
Once again, the data suggests a more nuanced picture.
Ran Abramitzky, a professor of economics at Stanford University, helped lead a nationally representative study of incarceration rates for immigrants and U.S.-born citizens from 1870 to 2020. The study included all immigrants, not just those in the country illegally.
According to Abramitzky in an email to The Times, the findings were that “as a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the U.S.-born for 150 years.”
The study also found that “compared to the U.S.-born, immigrant incarceration rates have declined since 1960” and that “immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated” and “30 percent less likely even compared to U.S.-born whites.” That was true for immigrants in all regions, it said.
Abramitzky said he has also studied political rhetoric around immigration, analyzing “200,000 congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential speeches since 1880.”
That research, he said, found that “attitudes toward immigrants in congressional speeches have generally improved in recent decades, but have also become increasingly polarized by political party.
“Democrats are increasingly positive, highlighting immigrants’ contributions to the U.S.,” Abramitzky continued, “and Republicans remain negative, increasingly focusing on issues of crime and legality when discussing immigrants.”
Data shows that fentanyl deaths in the United States increased under Biden, but also under then-President Trump.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that drug overdoses in the United States, including fentanyl, declined in 2023 for the first time since 2018. Deaths attributed specifically to fentanyl declined to 74,702 in 2023 from 76,226 in 2022.
