Gov. Gavin Newsom and elements of the media keep making the claim that Republican states ‘red states’ have higher crime than Democrat states or ‘blue states’. This is really one of those ‘lying with statistics’ exercises.

The national political split is in great part an urban-rural split. Crime is an urban problem. That means it’s by definition of a Democrat problem since there’s hardly any such creature as a ‘Republican city’.

One major (and perhaps the biggest difference) between conservative and liberal states is that liberal states revolve around urban areas while in conservative states, urban areas are either so small they’re an afterthought or they’re broken hellholes. Outside of Florida and one or two other cases, there isn’t really an equivalent of L.A. or NYC in conservative states, a wealthy and prosperous city that plays a major role but which also has a sizable criminal underclass.

And so what you really end up with is comparing apples to oranges or L.A. to Jackson, Mississippi (Jackson always comes up when someone is invoking the myth of high-crime red states.) Jackson was formerly run by a leftist black nationalist named Chokwe Antar Lumumba, whose father wanted to create a black separatist city. It’s over 80% black.

The usual pattern with the so-called ‘high crime’ Democrat cities in Republican states is that they’re mostly in the South and occasionally in the Rust Belt, they’re majority minority cities with nothing really going for them.

Technically they have higher murder rates than LA or NYC, but they also lack the diversity, the wealth and the non-criminal prosperous population that lower the per capita crime rates of LA or NYC. Focus in on minority parts of LA or NYC and the crime rates will look very similar.

These cities not only don’t have Republican leaders, demographically they’re out of step with the state. Newsom and the media are really attacking blaming Republicans for crime committed in majority minority, mostly black cities.

Republican states aren’t high-crime states. Only Democrat cities are.