(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A new study found that Democrat-run counties have a staggering 60% higher murder rates than the Republican-run counties.
The Heritage Foundation study debunked one of the recent leftist talking points, which is that red states have the highest homicide numbers.
In his and his former research assistant Alexander Gage’s report on the study, the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Dayaratna said that murder rates have been higher in “blue counties” than they have been in “red counties” since 2002.
Using state-level data for homicides is misleading because the crimes are prosecuted at the local level, he added.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., previously said that “8 of the top 10 murder states are red.”
“And where in those red states are the murders happening and who is committing the murders? Oops you’ll never talk about that,” Nuance Bro wrote in the comment section, implying that all of that crime happens in Democrat-controlled big cities.
However, Newsom wasn’t the only leftist who pushed this propaganda. Last year, another America-hating leftist and a Democrat megadonor, George Soros wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “violent crime in recent years has generally been increasing more quickly in jurisdictions without reform-minded prosecutors.”
“Murder rates have been rising fastest in some Republican states led by tough-on-crime politicians,” he wrote.
However, Dayaratna and Gage said that studies that were cited by Democrats make that same argument about state-level murder rates since these studies, including a recent study from Third Way titled “The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem,” used a “flawed” methodology.
The reason why the methodology happened to be flawed was because crime is a local issue and, therefore, crime analysis must be undertaken at the local level.
“If you look at the analysis on a state-by-state level, it’s 34% higher in red states and blue states, according to the most recent data we analyzed, but then when you look at it as a county-by-county level, it is 60% higher in blue counties than red counties,” Dayaratna said, according to Slay News.
Dayaratna and Gage also added in their report that “drawing conclusions from state-level homicide data in such a manner is flawed” because each state has “federal, state, county and local law enforcement agencies, as well as prosecutors with different approaches to law enforcement often based on highly divergent political beliefs.”