So Donald Trump says crime in the nation’s capital is out of control: “Roving gangs of youth,” and the like.
After declaring a public safety emergency, he invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which allows the president to take control of the city’s police force during an emergency for up to 30 days. He also deployed 800 National Guard troops, and then ordered them to be armed, just to increase tensions in a city where the crime rate has been dramatically dropping for the past couple of years.
Now, more than 2,200 Guard members are picking up trash on the heavily-touristed streets of Washington, D.C., proving for the umpteenth time that everything Trump does is for show, including debasing the military.
Despite Trump’s baseless claims and 19th-century rhetoric about “bloodshed, bedlam, squalor, and worse,” the last big violent criminal activity in Washington that most of us recall occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.
The six Republican governors who have sent additional National Guard troops to stand around and do little in the nicer parts of Washington have cities in their states with far higher crime rates than the nation’s capital. Ohio, West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee each have at least one metropolitan area with more crime than D.C.
Republicans would no doubt respond that those are “blue cities” with Democratic mayors. Many are: Over the last 10 years, between 61 and 65 of the top 100 U.S. cities have had Democratic mayors. OK then — but it’s also true that seven of the 10 states with the highest murder rates are governed by Republicans.
But if we’re talking about a crime problem, Mr. President, let’s talk about crime in rural America. Some 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, and the crime rates in those places, broadly speaking, are higher. But crime in rural areas ain’t nothing — and much of it goes unreported for various reasons (e.g., more people know each other, the deputy sheriff is friends with the family of the alleged perpetrator and so on).
A friend of mine — I’ll call him Mel, because that’s his name and he’s a devoted fighter of authoritarianism — recently posted some interesting statistics about crime in America. (Yeah, I know: The fascists among us don’t trust the numbers.) Mel is a teacher and former wrestling coach who spent his career in rural schools.
So let’s talk briefly about rural versus urban crime, Mel-style.
According to the nonpartisan USAFacts, crime rates are, as anyone would expect, significantly higher in urban than in rural areas. In 2021, 24.5 out of 1,000 people above the age of 12 and living in urban areas reported being victims of violent crime, and 157.5 out of 1,000 were victims of property crimes. In rural areas, those numbers were much lower, 11.1 and 57.7, respectively. The number of reported crimes in suburban areas fell right in between.
But — and there’s a pretty big but: According to a 2023 paper published in JAMA Surgery, the “most rural” areas in this country have higher rates of death by firearm than the most urban areas. It should be noted, and then underlined, that suicide is by far more prevalent than homicide in both areas. If guns are present, suicide attempts are much more likely to be fatal. People in rural America — yes, it’s a stereotype, but it’s true — simply have a lot more guns.
Still, the main takeaway is that overall rates of reported crime victimization across America, in both urban and rural areas, have been dropping for decades: They are 58% lower in 2022 than in 1979. This may qualify as the most misunderstood or disbelieved fact in modern-day America: No matter what cable TV and social media may tell you, crime is a lot lower now than in decades past.
Then there’s the issue that, absent an actual emergency, no city should see members of the National Guard on its streets. All citizens need a non-militarized, well-trained, well-paid, proportional police force to continue their work making the population feel safer.
And Republican leaders should remember that they, like many of us, are fathers and mothers and grandparents and rethink their hardline stance about the ludicrous, antiquated Second Amendment.
No other developed country in the world has to deal with its population being awash in guns. Parents should not have to worry about sending their children to school. Police officers should not always be on edge because, at any moment, they are likely to encounter an armed person. Apart from Donald Trump himself — and the cowards in Congress and ideologues on the Supreme Court supporting his moves to dismantle our democracy — guns and homelessness are the true emergencies in this country.
Getting back to our less-discussed kind of crime, many people in rural areas, for cultural reasons touched on earlier, choose not to report being a victim. Social services, such as safe houses for abused women and their children, are often scarce or nonexistent in rural areas. So, how many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported in rural America? How many cases of domestic abuse?
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Actually, we have some idea. In 2015, 19 percent of people in urban areas who experienced rape or sexual assault reported it to police, but only 2 percent of folks in rural areas did so. The fact that only one in five women in urban areas report such crimes is pretty darn bad; that only two women in 100 do in rural areas is abysmal. As Mel noted, “Underreporting is a significant issue in small communities.”
Mel’s post about crimes going unreported (and, thus, unpunished) in rural communities reminded me of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” published in 1892, in which Sherlock Holmes, after solving a case in the countryside, remarks to Dr. Watson that he feels more comfortable in London than in rural England, where the bucolic may hide the horrendous — a statement that, of course, astonishes Watson. Holmes, patient as always, explains:
But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.
The ”poor ignorant folk” in Holmes’ mind were the undereducated country people of 19th-century England. But how many smart, educated people living in small communities in rural America really know their rights and have access to legal help?
Donald Trump spews nothing but self-serving nonsense — often encouraging violence with a wink and a smirk — and he’s done that all his life. To think that this man, with 34 felony convictions for fraud as well as civil judgments for sexual assault and defamation, has the nerve to talking about cracking down on crime is beyond absurd. It would be like Trump’s old friend Jeffrey Epstein (they shared “wonderful” secrets, Trump allegedly wrote) counseling us on the dangers of pedophiles.
And consider what an immense waste of taxpayers’ money this deployment of the National Guard is. Somehow, we are not hearing Republican outrage about that. The so-called red states’ so-called governors, who have curried favor with Trump by sending their part-time soldiers to D.C., should be ashamed of themselves. So far, they’re not, which makes it even more disgraceful.
This article was originally published on Medium. Used by permission.
The post Hey Mr. President: What about rural crime in red states? appeared first on Salon.com.