The “red state murder problem” that Gov. Newsom relies on was debunked in a report by the Heritage Foundation three years ago.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) may have thought he had scored against President Donald Trump in a recent war of words over rampant crime and the deployment of federal law enforcement agents to Democratic-led cities.
“If the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence,” Newsom said, “there’s no question in my mind that he’ll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana and Mississippi” because, according to Newsom, the murder rate in Louisiana is “nearly four times higher than California’s.” “I want to present some facts to the president of the United States, and I imagine this is alarming to the president to learn these facts,” he said. Newsom also signed on to a joint statement with 18 other Democratic governors that acknowledged “[e]very American deserves to feel safe in their neighborhood and community,” but asserted Trump’s actions were an “ineffective” and “chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard.”
News and commentary site Issues & Insights responded to Gov. Newsom’s finger-pointing claims of excessive crime in red states with an analysis that tracked the most serious crime, homicide, across the country, and discovered the cities with the highest homicide rates (2024) are almost exclusively run by Democrats. What’s more, in many of these localities it has been decades since they’ve had a Republican mayor. Of the twenty cities at the top tier of homicides, only one – Shreveport, Louisiana – has a Republican mayor, and he’s a recent outlier in an almost unbroken line of Democrat mayors stretching back to 1874. New Orleans, at number 5 on the list, hasn’t had a Republican as its top civic official since 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant was president. Chicago, a city that President Trump has singled out as a crime hotspot, hasn’t had a Republican as its chief executive since gangster Al Capone was put in the slammer for tax evasion.
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