Many immigrant voters on Election Day told Documented they voted for Donald Trump because of the city’s rising crime rates. But is crime really up? We looked at citywide and nationwide crime statistics.
As of September 2024, New York Police Department data shows that major crime in New York City has consistently fallen this year compared to last year. Several categories of crime dropped, including murder by 11.8%, grand larceny by 9.8%, robbery by 7.8%, and burglary by 3.8%.
However, there were notable increases in other crimes, like rape. Reports of rape increased 38.2% from September 2023 to September 2024, an anomaly that the NYPD attributes to the new Rape is Rape Act, which expanded the legal definition of rape to include various forms of nonconsensual sexual contact. According to the NYPD, the new law, which recently went into effect on Sept. 1, explains why reports of rape have gone up.
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The NYPD data also shows an 8.7% decrease in violence and disorder in the subway system. The NYPD attributes this to the new methods they’ve implemented to prevent crime. Such methods have included adding more police officers patrolling the subway system, particularly after seeing an increase in crime during January this year. The data also shows that outside of the pandemic years, major crime in New York’s transit system has “reached its lowest level for any September, and for any third quarter, since 2009,” according to the NYPD.
The data then begs the question: If the city’s crime rates are down, why then do voters have crime as a top concern?
A recent report from Pew Research, published this year, shows that people tend to believe there’s an increase in crime, even when official data shows there’s a decrease. In 23 out of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have reported believing that national crime has increased compared to the previous year, even though crime rates have generally declined over most of the studied period.
One reason for this may be because public opinions on crime vary based on factors like race, ethnicity, and the political party a person identifies with. For instance, among the conservative Republican voters Gallup surveyed on midterm voting in 2022, 77% viewed violent crime as “very important to their vote,” compared with 63% of moderate or liberal Republican voters, 65% of moderate or conservative Democratic voters and 34% of liberal Democratic voters, the report states.
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Media coverage also affects voters’ perceptions: Trump’s presidential campaign this year centered a rhetoric that violent crime is up across the country. Even when reporters fact-checked his claims as wrong, Trump stuck to his messaging, which may have further influenced the perception of rising crime in the country among supporters and voters. For instance, Trump said this past August at a Glendale, Arizona, campaign stop, “Kamala Harris has presided over a 43% increase in violent crime.” But an analysis from PolitiFact found his claim to be “mostly false,” finding that, among other factors, FBI data shows violent crime dropped by 5.7% from 2022 to 2023.
In 2024, another Pew Research survey found that 68% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe crime reduction should be a top priority for the president and Congress this year, compared to 47% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning individuals.
