Bloody Blue Cities – WSJ

During the last three years, homicides nationwide have reached their highest levels in decades.

The deadly spike coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic: The rate of killings rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 and remained high through the following year, according to a Washington Post database created to track the toll. Even now, as the bloodshed has slowed, the homicide rate outpaces pre-pandemic levels.

The Post notes the horrific cost of the crime wave on victims and their families and adds:

Gun crime disproportionately impacts people of color, especially Black men. Victim data collected from each city profiled here show Black people made up more than 80 percent of the total homicide victims in 2020 and 2021. And while data show gun deaths have surged around the country, a number of cities lead the way.

The Post visited nine of these places, which have seen some of the nation’s highest recent murder rates.

Is it merely a coincidence that the mayors of all nine of these places are Democrats? The Post story doesn’t make the connection. Instead, the newspaper simply observes that the featured cities “are spread mostly across the South and Midwest.” Hmm.

There’s an old saying that a problem well-defined is half-solved. Unfortunately in this case the Post’s framing of the story may lead some readers to the strange conclusion that violent crime is largely a phenomenon of jurisdictions run by Republicans. It just so happens that a number of Democrats including California Gov.

Gavin Newsom

have lately been taking to social media to promote exactly this dubious hypothesis.

Fortunately for Post editors eager to add important context to their news coverage in the future, they can consult their columnist Marc Thiessen, who recently debunked Democrats’ claims of a “red state murder problem” based on homicide rates in a number of states that tend to vote Republican. Wrote Mr. Thiessen:

In most of these red states, the high murder rates are driven by the lethal violence in their blue cities.

Take Missouri. Yes, it voted for Trump. But it is also home to two of the most dangerous U.S. cities — St. Louis and Kansas City — both of which are run by Democrats. Earlier this year, CBS News did an analysis of the “deadliest U.S. cities” using the latest FBI and other crime data. In 2019, it found, St. Louis had the highest murder rate in the nation… the vast majority of Missouri’s homicides took place in its Democrat-run cities.

The same is true for Louisiana, which has two of the most lethal Democratic-run cities in the country: Baton Rouge, which in 2019 had the sixth-highest murder rate in the nation with 31.72 murders per 100,000 residents, and New Orleans, which had the seventh-highest rate with 30.67 murders per 100,000. Without those cities, the state’s murder rate would significantly drop.

That’s not all. Tennessee’s homicide rate was driven up by Democratic-run Memphis, which ranked ninth in the country with 29.21 homicides per 100,000 residents…

Now along comes the report from the Post’s news side chronicling the violence in St. Louis, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Memphis and other places run by mayors from one political party, which goes unmentioned. As citizens consider how to stop the bloodshed, it’s critical to examine a city’s political leadership and its policy choices.

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In Possibly Related News
Leanne Italie reports for the Associated Press:

“Gaslighting” — behavior that’s mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful — is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

Lookups for the word on merriam-webster.com increased 1,740% in 2022 over the year before… Merriam-Webster’s top definition for gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that “causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

… the word was brought to life more than 80 years ago with “Gas Light,” a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.

It birthed two film adaptations in the 1940s. One, George Cukor’s “Gaslight” in 1944, starred Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist and Charles Boyer as Gregory Anton. The two marry after a whirlwind romance and Gregory turns out to be a champion gaslighter. Among other instances, he insists her complaints over the constant dimming of their London townhouse’s gaslights is a figment of her troubled mind. It wasn’t.

Ms. Italie notes other competitors for the word of the year, and sadly readers may find that some of them also bring to mind examples of deceit:

— “Oligarch,” driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

— “Omicron,” the persistent COVID-19 variant and the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.

— “Codify,” as in turning abortion rights into federal law.

— “Queen consort,” what

King Charles

’ wife, Camilla is newly known as.

— “Raid,” as in the search of former President

Donald Trump’s

Mar-a-Lago home.

— “Sentient,” with lookups brought on by Google canning the engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient.

— “Cancel culture,” enough said…

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)

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