Why Do Big Cities Have More Crime? Let's Look at the Numbers

After the death of Charlie Kirk, a well-known conservative commentator, social media was flooded with claims that political party membership could predict violent crime rates. One post, shared by Tim Pool, a conservative podcaster, showed a chart comparing violent crime rates in 2023 based on the political party in control of major cities. The chart suggested that cities led by Democrats had higher crime rates. Pool's chart was widely shared, even by Elon Musk, who reposted it to his millions of followers. However, the chart's methodology was unclear. Pool did not specify which cities he included or where he got his data. This lack of transparency raised questions about the chart's accuracy. To understand the situation better, we decided to look at the data ourselves. We used the FBI's 2023 Crime in the U. S. reports, which track violent crimes like murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. We also considered the political affiliation of the mayors in these cities. We found that Pool's chart was misleading. It added up the violent crime rates of cities with Democratic mayors and compared them to the rates of cities with Republican mayors. However, this method is flawed because there are far more cities with Democratic mayors than Republican ones. Adding up the crime rates this way naturally makes the Democratic cities look worse. Experts agree that this method of comparing crime rates is not meaningful. Thomas D. Stucky, a professor of criminal justice, explained that this approach is like comparing the average temperatures of 12 cities to the average temperature of a single city. The numbers don't tell you much about the actual differences. We created our own charts to see if we could find a more accurate way to represent the data. Our first chart followed Pool's method as closely as possible. It showed that cities with Democratic mayors had higher crime rates, but this was mainly because there were more of them. Our second chart calculated the average crime rates for cities with Democratic, Republican, and independent mayors. This method was more statistically sound, but our dataset was still too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. Our third chart used a larger dataset of the 50 U. S. cities with the highest crime rates. This chart gave a better picture of the actual differences between cities based on the party of their mayors. However, even this chart couldn't tell us why these differences exist. The debate about whether the political party of a city's leaders affects crime rates has been going on for years. Some people argue that Democratic-led cities have more crime, while others say that Republican-led states have higher homicide rates. However, experts believe that a mayor's political party is not a significant factor in crime rates. Other factors, like economic inequality and social policies, play a much bigger role. In short, while the data shows that cities with Democratic mayors tend to have higher crime rates, this doesn't mean that the mayor's political party is the cause. Many other factors contribute to crime rates, and it's important to look at the bigger picture.