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Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “soft on crime” Florida made arrests in just 5% of the state’s murders in 2022 [1]
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Date: 2023-12-30
Violent criminals run free in Florida under right-wing rule, with Florida cities like Jacksonville showing homicide and gun killing rates 3 to 4 times higher than in leftist San Francisco.
Near-complete 2022 Centers for Disease Control statistics show 2,419 homicides in California and 1,512 in Florida, a per-capita homicide rate 13% higher in Florida, including a gun murder rate 22% higher. Yet, FBI figures show that while California law enforcement agencies made 1,439 homicide arrests in 2022, Florida’s made just 78.
California, with 1.7 times more people, arrested 21 times more people for violent crimes in 2022 than Florida’s law enforcement. Oregon with just one-fifth of Florida’s population and a homicide rate 25% lower than Florida’s, arrested more people for homicide and other violent crimes than Florida did.
No wonder residents of liberal California, New York, and Oregon are so much safer from guns and murder than residents of right-wing Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma. Liberal states enforce actual consequences for shooting people.
Right-wing commentators led by the Heritage Foundation, media, and politicians have been reduced to abject lying to cover up Florida’s appalling murder and gun violence and its terrible law enforcement record.
The crude way the right wing has lied – which should abolish any credibility the Heritage Foundation and Cully Stimson, its Senior Legal Fellow, had on crime issues – is highly relevant to the figures leading off this article.
Release of the FBI’s 2022 statistics in its Crime Data Explorer ignited a flood of right-wing media and commentator claims that “crime in California soars” while “crime declines in Florida.”
Heritage’s Stimson eagerly pronounced Florida “lawful” and California “lawless” due to supposedly liberal “Soros” prosecutors, which was downright laughable considering what he forgot to mention. The FBI’s CDE page shows fewer than HALF of Florida’s law enforcement agencies (including high-crime cities like Jacksonville) filed reports in 2022, while 98% of California’s law enforcement agencies did file reports.
Simply hiding bad numbers seems to be a DeSantis-era tactic. Prior to his 2019 governorship, well over 90% of Florida’s law enforcement agencies regularly reported crime statistics to the FBI. No more.
Just leave out more than half the state. That will make your crime numbers look great. Complete crime statistics, of course, will show that Florida has a lot more crime, murder, violence, and arrests than its half-baked 2022 numbers show.
Heritage apparently forgot that Florida agencies’ failure to report crimes also meant they failed to report arrests, which produces tiny numbers making Florida look like a no-consequences, arrest-free zone – exactly the false image of California Heritage peddles.
Heritage’s bad-joke idiocies keep coming up weeks later, as in December’s debate between DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Until Heritage corrects its lies, responsible media and policy forums should exclude them from discussion.
Mike Males is senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/30/2214585/-Gov-Ron-DeSantis-s-soft-on-crime-Florida-made-arrests-in-just-5-of-the-state-s-murders-in-2022?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
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