California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) may have thought he had scored against President Donald Trump in a recent war of words over rampant crime and the deployment of federal law enforcement agents to Democratic-led cities. “If the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence,” Newsom said, “there’s no question in my mind that he’ll likely be sending the troops into Louisiana and Mississippi” because, according to Newsom, the murder rate in Louisiana is “nearly four times higher than California’s.” “I want to present some facts to the president of the United States, and I imagine this is alarming to the president to learn these facts,” he said. Newsom also signed on to a joint statement with 18 other Democratic governors that acknowledged “[e]very American deserves to feel safe in their neighborhood and community,” but asserted Trump’s actions were an “ineffective” and “chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard.”
News and commentary site Issues & Insights responded to Gov. Newsom’s finger-pointing claims of excessive crime in red states with an analysis that tracked the most serious crime, homicide, across the country, and discovered the cities with the highest homicide rates (2024) are almost exclusively run by Democrats. What’s more, in many of these localities it has been decades since they’ve had a Republican mayor. Of the twenty cities at the top tier of homicides, only one – Shreveport, Louisiana – has a Republican mayor, and he’s a recent outlier in an almost unbroken line of Democrat mayors stretching back to 1874. New Orleans, at number 5 on the list, hasn’t had a Republican as its top civic official since 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant was president. Chicago, a city that President Trump has singled out as a crime hotspot, hasn’t had a Republican as its chief executive since gangster Al Capone was put in the slammer for tax evasion.
Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) has his own disingenuous twist on Newsom’s red-state theme, and has blamed guns coming from “red states” (specifically, Indiana, Mississippi and Louisiana) and President Trump for the violent crime in Chicago. “We will never be able to end gun violence in Chicago as long as the President continues to allow tens of thousands of guns to be trafficked into our state and our city…these guns come from red states,” Johnson said, adding, “that is the harsh reality, whether Republicans like it or not.”
As Issues & Insights points out, civic leadership matters because law enforcement decisions made by the district attorney, the police department, and local politicians play a critical role in crime rates. For cities located in red states but run by Democrats, “it’s more likely than not that residents are stuck with local prosecutors who won’t prosecute crimes, police departments that are understaffed and demoralized, [and] criminals who, if they are caught at all, get released on cashless bail.” One jarring example is the recent announcement by Mayor Johnson that it is “racist, it is immoral, it is unholy” to put criminals in prison, and “it is not the way” to reduce violent crime. With messages from the top that justice is “immoral” and punishment doesn’t work, it is no surprise that crime flourishes.
As these paltering politicians seek to school President Trump about “alarming facts,” the “harsh reality” is that their superficial arguments fall apart on the most basic scrutiny.
The “red state murder problem” that Gov. Newsom relies on was debunked in a report by the Heritage Foundation three years ago. Red state governors are not the ones setting local law enforcement priorities, budgets and policies, and the murder rate in each state is “largely a function of the large number of murders in a state’s biggest city or cities.” When the crime statistics from the deep-blue big cities within the otherwise red states are removed, the “state-level crime rates fall—in some cases, dramatically.” For instance, the report authors recalculated state homicide rates for Louisiana after removing Orleans Parish, which encompasses New Orleans, and Mississippi (after excluding Hinds County, encompassing Jackson), resulting in a double-digit reduction in the state rate for both. The same recalculation for Illinois after excluding the Chicago metropolitan area yielded a 55% decrease in the state homicide rate.
Whether a state as a whole voted for Donald Trump or not “has nothing whatever to do with the homicide rates within its constituent parts,” and in the same way, the President isn’t the entity “allowing” guns to be trafficked into Illinois and Chicago. Illinois scores a very high “A minus” grade from gun control group Giffords for having “some of the strongest gun laws in the country,” including gun trafficking prohibitions.
A new national poll shows two-thirds (66%) of the public feel crime is a major problem in the country overall, and over 80% say it is a major problem in large cities. Over half of the respondents (55%) felt it was acceptable for the U.S. military/National Guard to assist police in urban law enforcement, as President Trump has ordered to be done.
Enforcing laws and taking responsibility for public safety is so much more strenuous than uttering facile what-about-isms and storytelling about inanimate objects. Rumor has it that Gov. Newsom cherishes notions of running as a presidential candidate for 2028. If true, he may be best advised to tune into the prevailing public mood and pay more than lip service to the belief that every American “deserves to feel safe in their neighborhood and community.”
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