During a Fox News segment on falling crime rates, a network contributor downplayed the phenomenon and blamed lenient prosecutors for intentionally lowering certain statistics—with the panel insisting that lawlessness is still rising because “people are feeling it.”
In a fact sheet released last week, the White House called attention homicide statistics falling by about 12 percent from 2022 to 2023. The Biden administration also sought to contrast the violent crimes rates during his predecessor’s time in office by pointing out that from 2019 to 2020, murders rose by nearly 30 percent, according to FBI statistics.
Despite some outliers—as is to be expected—national trends have shown violence to be declining, even if people aren’t “feeling” it, for whatever reason.
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Fox’s segment, for instance, highlighted some voters’ concerns about “migrant crime.” Reporter Alexis McAdams then said the issue “is sitting in the national spotlight” as three migrants’ mugshots were shown on screen. One, a 26-year-old Venezuelan, has been charged with last month’s murder of nursing student Laken Riley.
Former President Donald Trump has also made so-called “migrant crime” a topic of his campaign speeches—while President Joe Biden has spoken about crime reduction and public safety in general being a “top priority.”
Crime, Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich later said, is “a huge issue” and “people are feeling it.”
“What caught my attention last week when [the Biden administration] put out this fact sheet…they tried to go back to 2020 and blame the Trump Administration in saying that murders were at an all-time high in the previous administration. Well, what was happening in the summer of 2020? It was the ‘defund the police’ movement where you had a number of cities burnt to the ground in a number of areas. You had a number of police officers retiring and now you are seeing the fallout of that,” Pavlich said, blaming Democrats.
The number of police officers in Minneapolis—where George Floyd was murdered by an officer that year—has dropped to about 560 from nearly 900 in 2019, local outlet Star Tribune reported. Yet crime also fell for the second straight year in 2023—a statistic seemingly at odds with Pavlich’s argument.
Anchor John Roberts then recalled a prior he had discussion with Pavlich. “You made the point that one of the reasons for declining crime is that a lot of these ‘soft on crime’ prosecutors are either reducing charges, letting people out with no charges, or declining to prosecute more serious crimes.”
“Exactly,” Pavlich replied. “I mean, statistics are only reflective of what is put into the system, right? So, if you have a number of prosecutors across the country who are downgrading serious felonies to misdemeanors, that makes it look like violent crime or burglaries…aren’t really happening.”
“But when you go outside and you walk around in these cities and you ask people, they will say they know somebody who has been a victim of a crime or they’ve been in a store like this where people come in and grab all these goods,” she continued. “That, of course, deteriorates into a bigger situation where stores leave, there’s no economic opportunity in certain neighborhoods, and therefore there is even more crime that continues to occur in this spiral.”
