Grand Canyon Times

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has claimed that violent crime has increased significantly in the U.S. amid new data showing that Arizona now has the ninth-highest violent crime rate in the nation and the 15th highest overall.

In an editorial published online by the New York Post, Sessions cited FBI crime data and survey data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which he claimed found that both the violent crime and murder rate increased in 2021. Sessions said Democrat politics are the reason for the spike.

“New FBI statistics show that our nation is suffering a historic surge in violent crime — one that was entirely predictable," Sessions wrote. "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.”

In 2019 there were 1,016 violent crime incidents and 1,194 offenses reported by nine law enforcement agencies in Arizona, according to the FBI Crime Data Explorer. In 2021, that number increased to 9,267 violent crime incidents and 11,085 offenses, as reported by 79 Arizona law enforcement agencies, the site reported.

Jeffrey H. Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative wrote in the City Journal that a spike of 29% occurred in violent crime in cities and urban areas between 2020-2021, according to the NCVS. Crime in rural and suburban areas did not change significantly, Anderson wrote, but the violent crime rate in urban areas was anywhere between 29% to 42% higher than rural areas from 2018-2020, according to the NCVS. In 2021, however, that number rose to 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 (157.5 to 57.7 victimizations per 1,000 households),” Anderson wrote.

Despite Sessions' claims of the 27% hike in murders, the City Journal pointed out that data from NCVS was not as reliable because of the pandemic. Anderson wrote that the rise in violent crime is "the result of policy making and ignorance of the 'Broken Windows' theory," which suggests that police ignoring minor crimes "will lead to more serious crimes, especially in an urban environment."

Sessions goes on to blame Democrats, who “ignored the warnings of law enforcement officials and abandoned policies shown to work, replacing them with naïveté and wishful thinking. The results are now clear for all to see," he wrote. Sessions said the larger cities with the greatest hikes in violent crime "abandoned their police," and he cited an FBI statistic that arrests dropped 25% in 2020, which he said dovetailed with the 27% increase in murders. 

In Portland, homicides tripled from 2016 to 2020 and continue to rise, the New York Post reported. Portland sees a homicide "every four days on average," Sessions said, adding that in cities such as Minneapolis and New York, homicides have almost doubled since 2019. Blaming “the Left,” Sessions wrote “Woke policies make America more dangerous.”

According to a Reuters report, Republicans could have the upper hand in the midterm election this year due to high crime rates in Democrat-controlled cities. A Reuters poll claimed Republicans are likely to win the House and the Senate, citing 4,415 U.S. adults across the country who were surveyed, saying the study had a “credibility interval, a measure of precision, of between 2 and 5 percentage points.” 

The poll, which was conducted from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, found that 39% of registered voters would choose a Republican to “solve crime,” while 30% would choose a Democrat. 

The top issues on the ballot, the poll said, are inflation, the economy, immigration and crime. 

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

In some cities, murder rates fell slightly in the first half of 2022, but robberies and assaults are both up, Reuters reported. Women who live in suburban areas favor Republicans on crime by 8 points over Democrats, the poll reported.

In total, there were 448,783 violent crime incidents and 520,209 offenses reported by 9,042 law enforcement agencies in 2019, FBI Crime Data Explorer reported. In 2021, that number increased to 694,050 violent-crime incidents, and 817,020 offenses, as reported by 11,794 agencies.