We’re zooming into the 2024 race with the same bad crime-data analysis

We talk about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plans for 2024 the way we might hedge our bets about an upcoming Harlem Globetrotters game: Maybe this time, despite the odds, they’re going to lose. And maybe Republican DeSantis won’t run for president, even if he’s been seen doing all the things people who invariably end up running do.

One of those things was to make a number of stops over the weekend in cities that his ideological allies view as crime-infested mud pits. DeSantis visited Philadelphia, Chicago and New York in his swing, talking up how he and Florida were addressing crime properly and those cities and their leaders weren’t.

On Twitter, he shared a summary of his stop in New York — speaking to police in Staten Island, which is like a Democrat visiting the hostile red-state territory of a public library in Austin.

Florida “leads the nation in protecting LEOS [law enforcement officers] & our crime rate is at a 50-year low,” he wrote, “while NYC saw a 23% surge in major crime in 2022. Anti-police politicians should stop catering to the woke mob.”

That last bit is the point: It’s the “woke” policies of Democratic cities that leads them to have such awful crime, while the presumably non-woke efforts of DeSantis are unalloyed successes. DeSantis has a notoriously malleable definition of “woke,” but if the wails of right-wing media can serve as a guide for what he’s complaining about — as they invariably have in the past — he means things like cutting funding for police departments or revising prosecution practices.

Before we assess that, though, let’s consider DeSantis’s actual claims about crime, the data he offers to establish the foundation for his argument. Is it the case that Florida has been successful while New York hasn’t been?

You would think this question has an easy answer. It does not.

Last year, as rhetoric in the midterms became increasingly focused on crime, I noted that the discussion was hampered by incomplete and delayed crime data. While police departments certainly know how many arrests they have made, they do not always — and in fact often don’t — share that information publicly. How crimes are categorized can also vary at a local level, which is one reason there’s a national data collection run by the FBI called Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR).

Unfortunately for our current discussions of crime, though, the FBI was in the midst of transitioning to a new method of data collection just as the pandemic hit. Figures for 2021, then, were not comparable to 2020′s — and many jurisdictions didn’t provide 2021 data in the new system. So, while Fox News was eager to talk about crime spiking from the early fall until about an hour after polls closed last November, there actually wasn’t good data on whether crime was rising or falling nationally. At least one indication, an analysis of how often crimes were reported, suggested little change from 2020 to 2021 — but even that was nearly a year old by Election Day.

So let’s just consider DeSantis’s numbers in the context of what we do know.

First, he’s comparing apples and oranges — Big Apples and Florida oranges, if you will. He offers a number for the increase in “major crime” in New York City, 23 percent, and contrasts that with Florida being at a 50-year-low in crime. Those are very different measures.

We do have one direct measure we can look at: homicides in New York City vs. homicides in Florida’s most populous city, Jacksonville. In 2021, the New York Police Department recorded 488 homicides. The year following, it was down to 438. That’s a decrease of 10 percent. The Jacksonville sheriff’s department also releases homicide data, indicating 112 killings in 2021 and 128 in 2022. That’s up 14 percent.

Yes, there were 3.4 times as many killings in New York, but the city is nearly nine times as large. On a population-adjusted basis, the number of killings in Jacksonville was about 2.5 times that of New York.

In situations like this, it’s common for the person criticizing the left’s approach to crime to insist that DeSantis isn’t responsible for the rate of crime in a city he doesn’t run. This tactic often works well because the mayors of those cities are generally Democrats. It doesn’t work in Jacksonville, though, where the mayor is Republican Lenny Curry.

DeSantis wasn’t talking about homicides, of course. He was talking about “major crime,” a category for which the Jacksonville sheriff’s department doesn’t release public data. It’s also a category that includes things that aren’t part of the FBI’s definition of violent crime, like car thefts. Under the FBI’s definition of violent crime, the rise in New York was a still-bad 18 percent. That’s due mostly to a 26 percent jump in robbery. And, again, we don’t have data for Jacksonville to compare.

So what about Florida’s “50-year low”? As the Tampa Bay Times wrote in December, that’s not as clear-cut as DeSantis would like to claim, being based on the FBI’s incomplete 2021 UCR data. The FBI’s website warns against comparing 2021 data with that of prior years. The Times article also quoted experts saying that “the reported statewide drops in violent crime and property crime in Florida are broadly in line with what the FBI reported nationally based on estimates using the new methodology.”

Since the UCR data are spotty and since New York’s 2021 data are even spottier (in part because the NYPD didn’t contribute using the new system), it’s hard to compare apples-and-apples here, either. (It’s worth noting that New York’s violent crime rate was near its own 50-year-low in 2020.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collects data on deaths from assault, however, letting us at least approximate a comparison on each state’s homicide rates. The data for 2022 aren’t complete, but the available data for both 2021 and 2022 show higher homicide totals for Florida than New York. In each year, the population-adjusted rate of homicide was 1.5 times higher in DeSantis’s state.

Perhaps your response to all of this is to grant DeSantis the benefit of the doubt on his broader argument. After all, robbery in New York City was up 26 percent in 2022. Was this perhaps a function of the policies of the city’s new district attorney, who announced upon taking office that he would reduce the number of arrests for which he’d seek jail time? That policy was quickly rolled back, but conservative media continued to suggest that crime was surging in New York because of his policies. (Often, discussions of rising crime in New York ignored the falling homicide rate.) It’s not clear that the two are linked.

It’s also not clear if reforms to bail laws in New York contributed to the increase in robberies in New York, as some on the right have suggested. Such analyses are made more difficult in part by the limited availability of comparable data elsewhere: If robbery increased in Jacksonville just as much, it would suggest that New York laws aren’t the problem.

This is all awfully generous to DeSantis, who is drawing a direct comparison between the city and his state using data-adjacent rhetoric. In the same way that Fox News sought to create a miasma of fear about crime last year citing cherry-picked data, DeSantis is trying to create a sense that he’s got the answers on crime — however little good it did Jacksonville.

We’ll no doubt hear more about this should DeSantis decide to run for president, which he may or may not do.