MILWAUKEE — “When Minneapolis was in flames, and businesses were in ruins, Kamala Harris encouraged and enabled the criminals and the rioters. She even promoted a fund to release the criminals from jail,” Rep. Tom Emmer, majority whip of the House, thundered in his speech Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention. “One criminal Kamala Harris freed in Minneapolis went on to murder a man in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
Tuesday’s theme at the RNC was “Make America Safe Again,” as one speaker after another stoked the story line that the Biden-Harris administration has all but facilitated the proliferation of drugs, violent crime, and massive illegal immigration. “Under Joe Biden, the rule of law has disintegrated, crime is rampant, our communities are under siege, and our brave law enforcement officers are consistently being vilified,” said Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt.
The night's speeches included many prominent Republican officeholders but also included speakers – “everyday Americans,” in GOP convention lingo – who had personally been devastated by random crime and drugs. One such speaker, Anne Funder, told the story of how her son, Westin, died after being “poisoned,” in her words, by fentanyl, which he unknowingly consumed while trying another drug with his peers. “I hold Joe Biden, Kamala Harris … and Gavin Newsom, and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son,” she told the delegates with tears in her eyes.
“Rachel, a joyful, accomplished athlete and mother of five, was raped and murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant,” another speaker, Michael Morin, told the RNC crowd. He continued with the story of his sister, Rachel Morin, who was killed on a trail in Hartford County, Maryland. “Open borders are often portrayed as compassionate and virtuous, but there is nothing compassionate about allowing violent criminals into our country and robbing children of their mother,” Michael said.
To prevent more of these tragic stories, entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy outlined the Republican Party’s goals for the criminal justice system: “Safe neighborhoods, clean streets, good jobs, a better life for your children, and a justice system that treats everyone equally, regardless of your skin color, and regardless of your political beliefs.”
Trump and Biden Competing Crime Stats
The claim that crime is much worse under the Biden administration than it was four years ago is also a staple of Trump’s rhetoric. At a recent Philadelphia rally, he told the audience that crime is “setting records every week” but that “unbelievably crooked Joe Biden is going around trying to claim that crime is down … crime is so much up.”
For its part, the Biden administration rebuts these claims, consistently arguing that crime is down. In a March statement, the White House insisted that crime had “declined across nearly every category in 2023” and that 2023 had “one of the lowest rates of violent crime in more than 50 years, and the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history.”
In other statements, Biden administration aides or campaign officials also reference the number of homicides under Trump. “In 2020, before I took office, the prior administration oversaw the largest increase in murders ever recorded,” they maintained, referencing the increase from 14,678 homicides in 2019 to 18,965 homicides in 2020, according to FBI statistics.
According to FBI data, from 2017 to 2019 the homicide rate was between 5 and 5.3 homicides per 100,000 people. In 2020, still under the Trump administration, it jumped up to 6.5. After Biden took office, the murder rate remained elevated in 2021 at 6.8 and 6.3 in 2022. If the FBI numbers are accurate, violent crime rates are essentially unchanged, registering at 383.9 per 100,000 on average in 2021 and 2022, the two years for which the data is available for the Biden administration, and 389.4 over the four years Trump was in office.
Trump’s rebuttal to these statistics is twofold. His first response to Biden’s critique is to question the validity of the FBI crime statistics: “The FBI crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake, they’re fake just like everything else in this administration,” Trump claimed at the Philadelphia rally. The FBI acknowledges that their data set isn’t complete. (In 2021, 29.5% of police departments, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report their crime data to the FBI.)
Instead of relying on incomplete FBI data, Republicans point to the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, which John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, tells RCP is the “gold standard” in crime statistics because it includes both reported and unreported crime. In 2022, it found that only 42% of crimes are reported to police.
The NCVS found that while the FBI registered a 2% drop in overall violent crime from 2021 to 2022, there was actually a 42% increase in violent crime. Trump has quoted these numbers in speeches as well, referencing at the Philly rally a “58% increase in rapes, an 89% increase in aggravated assaults, and a 56% increase in robberies.”
The other feature of Trump’s and the RNC’s messaging on crime is the referencing of specific tragedies. At his last rally before his attempted assassination on Saturday, Trump told the story of a child killed in June: “I spoke to the grieving mother of Jocelyn Nungaray, a precious 12-year-old girl from Houston who was tied up, stripped, assaulted, raped, and strangled to death after walking the block to a 7-Eleven.” After explaining the story, he blamed Biden, explaining how Jocelyn’s two alleged murderers were let into America illegally under the current administration.
Sen. Ted Cruz referenced similar stories in his Tuesday RNC speech. “Think of Kate Steinle, she was 32, walking with her father on a San Francisco pier, when a bullet tore through her heart. The man who fired that gun, he’d been deported five times. … Think of Laken Riley, just 22 years old, a nursing student with dreams of healing others. She went for a jog and never came home, her life taken by someone who should’ve never been here,” Cruz said.
Cruz continued, “These aren’t just stories or statistics, they’re our daughters, our sisters, our friends. The families don’t care about the empty numbers, they care about the empty chairs at their dinner tables.”
