There's a charming-ass Facebook group that Zuckerberg's algorithm regularly feeds to my, well, feed. It's a little ray of sunshine since the posts are all by people from other countries talking about their trips to New York City. And while some things will make any local cringe, like they really seem to love pedicab rides or they call the World Trade Center Memorial just "9/11" (as in "we went to 911"), the authors, from New Zealand or Indonesia or Argentina or Austria, mostly unabashedly really fucking love NYC. They share tips on places to go or stay or eat. They post their itineraries and ask for comment on if it's doable. Like I said, just charming as hell.
One topic a bunch of them write about is something that comes as a surprise to them: they say how safe they felt all the time. They felt safe in Times Square or Greenwich Village or Central Park. They felt safe walking at night and in the subways. They heard that crime was out of control or there was a plague of unhoused people or just that New York City was a hellscape, an unending gauntlet of murder, robbery, rape, and assault. Then they get here and...it's just not any of that. They let the group, which includes tons of people planning trips, know that they always felt perfectly fine.
Right now, in the cities of the United States, especially in the biggest cities in blue states, while there is still crime and there will always be crime, no shit, we are living through a golden age of safety and security. Hell, up here in the evil, sinful Northeast, we don't even own many guns. Less than 20% of people in New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are gun owners. On a per capita basis, it's like 5-10 guns per 1000 people. So "lots of fucking guns" is not the reason for crime to be going down.
I mean, shit's just getting better and better after a hiccup of a crime surge during the pandemic (no sports and no work makes for a clusterfuck of factors). The murder rates in a huge number of cities is "plummeting." In Philadelphia, the murder rate in 2024 is down 34% from the same time in 2023; in Boston, it's down 82%. Even in notoriously murdery places, it's down: 39% in New Orleans and 30% in Baltimore. Chicago is down only 7%, but that's still lower. In 2023, we had one of the biggest drops in the murder rate and in the overall violent crime rate ever. This year is looking to be even better.
Yet if you listen to Donald Trump and Republicans and the empty douches in right-wing media, you'd think that we're just one carjacking away from the complete collapse of cities into complete fucktastrophes. For instance, down on Fox "news," snarling shit badger Laura Ingraham snarled, "We all know communities don't feel safer...there's no meaningful change in the policies that are making America more dangerous." See, though, there's a big fucking difference between "feeling" safer and actually being fucking safer. Anecdotes and feelings are not facts. And who the hell is making communities feel unsafe? Shit badgers like Ingraham and actual goddamn criminals, like the extravagantly felonious Trump, whose real crimes Republicans eagerly and desperately ignore.
They do the same goddamn thing all the time. In 2022, the GOP tried to run on a fake "crime wave" engulfing the nation and it failed. Now, they are doing it again except this time they've merged the fearmongering over migrants at the southern border and crime, and now you've got what Trump dumbly says is "Biden migrant crime" occurring around the United States. "There has never been a border so bad. People coming in at levels nobody has ever seen with the people. Where are they coming from? Criminals like never before pouring into our country," Trump slurred at one of his clown carnivals of the damned. All over the right, you'd think the Hottentots were at our door, ready to scalp us and rape us and rob us, not necessarily in that order.
Except, of course, they aren't. There is no migrant crime wave, and the reason why is pretty fucking obvious. What idiot, after traveling for a thousand miles or more, through awful conditions and with the assistance of criminals, would want to call attention to themselves by committing crimes? That's a good way to get kicked the fuck out. It makes no sense at all. But that doesn't stop Trump from sayin, no shit, "Crime is down in Venezuela by 67% because they're taking their gangs and their criminals and depositing them very nicely into the United States." Except, of course, it's not down 67%. It's down, just not as much, because of a number of factors, none of which are that they're sending all "their gangs and their criminals" here.
But Republicans and dickhead podcasters, reporters, and commentators are just gonna keep flogging that myth, that lie about crime. Facts can go fuck themselves to death. Sure, of course, people are still gonna get killed and beaten and robbed in New York City. Over 8 million people live up here, and add another couple million for the metro area. But to pretend that an unabashed good - the low crime rate - is a lie made up to actively do harm, not just to Democratic politicians.
It's an attack on the poverty-stricken people from south of the border who are seeking a safer place to live because of the crime in their countries. And it's an attack on the psyche of Americans, making them paranoid and angry and voting for assholes who would undo the progress that's been made so far.
