Mention “New York” almost anywhere in the “heartland” of America and the first thing that comes to mind is crime. An exchange during Wednesday night’s Oklahoma gubernatorial debate featured an unexpected exchange between the two candidates that underlined some common misperceptions about crime in the United States.
The challenger, Democrat Joy Hofmeister duked it out with incumbent Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt during their scheduled debate. Hofmeister claimed that “the rates of violent crime in Oklahoma are higher… than New York and California,” blaming this statistic on Stitt for not keeping Oklahomans safer during his tenure.
Stitt interjected, “That’s not true” and laughed. When Hofmeister tried to continue, Stitt, still laughing, addressed the audience, saying, “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California?” The audience found the idea that Oklahoma might have a higher crime rate than New York ridiculous. Unthinkable!
Yet when this claim was fact-checked by John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, it was found to be accurate. Citing FBI data, Roman said that “Oklahoma is 12th in violence per 100,000 residents and 7th in property crime per 100,000 residents… California is lower for each, and New York is much safer and below the national averages in both property and violence. Overall, putting violent crime rates and property crime rates together, Oklahoma is on the list of the top 10 highest crime rate states.”
Defending his state’s record, Stitt’s campaign manager said, “We know Governor Stitt’s pro-safety, smart-on-crime policies are working because Oklahoma has the lowest recidivism rate in the nation…” Once again, this proved to be surprisingly misleading, because according to the Oklahoman, while the state does have a low recidivism rate, it also has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates.
What about homicide, then? Using the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Oklahoma ranked ahead of both California and New York in homicide rates from 2014 to 2020. A study released earlier this year by the center-left think tank Third Way found that murder rates were higher in “red” states that voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
So why are these statistics so surprising? “Oklahoma has a higher percentage of people living outside of cities, and cities typically have a higher crime rate… which explains why people are surprised by the data,” Roman said.
News outlets like Fox News have been hammering the issue of law and order for the upcoming midterm elections. This coverage has generally focused on cities — typically controlled by Democrats — including accusations of police defunding following the protests of 2020. However, few cities actually decreased police budgets, and most increased them over that time.
The coverage of crime extends beyond right-wing media and GOP attack ads: A Bloomberg analysis in July showed that while shootings in New York City were relatively flat — although higher than pre-pandemic levels — news coverage of the shootings was at a much higher rate than last year, leading the public to believe that the rates of crime were up when actually they weren’t.
Indeed, polling has shown that for decades, Americans almost always think crime is worse than it is, regardless of its level at the given time. And we can see from the Hofmeister-Stitt debate that thanks to the impact of the media, we are equally wrong about the places where crime is worst.
