WASHINGTON — Americans think New York is more dangerous than New Orleans, even though the Crescent City’s homicide rate is 12 times higher this year. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents rank Washington, D.C., as one of the country’s safer big cities, above cities like Miami, where the homicide rate is much lower. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents see Seattle as ominously dangerous, even though Houston has twice the homicide rate so far this year.
Americans are worried about crime ahead of the 2024 elections, but few have an accurate sense of the problem, according to a Times review of crime data and a recent Gallup poll that asked adults to judge whether 16 major cities are safe places to live or visit.
Los Angeles, which has had the fifth-lowest homicide rate this year among the 16 cities in the survey, was ranked as the third-most dangerous, with 41% of Americans polled describing it as a safe place to live or visit — the highest number Gallup has ever recorded for the city.
A closer look at L.A.’s results shows that partisanship now plays a huge role in Americans’ perceptions of crime and safety. Sixty-four percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents ranked L.A. as safe, while only 21% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents gave it the all-clear — the biggest gap in the poll at 43%.
The average gap between the two sides’ assessments of cities in the survey was 29 percentage points. That’s new: Political affiliation barely affected the results in 2006, the last time Gallup asked Americans about big-city safety.
“People are bad at perceiving crime rates,” said Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and consultant who runs AH Datalytics’ widely used website. “They’re not good judges of what is or what is not safe in another city.”
The public tends to blame homelessness on poverty, drug use, crime or even warm weather. But other cities don’t have L.A. levels of street homelessness because they have more available housing.
Assessing cities’ safety is tricky. Homicide rates spiked across the country during the pandemic and have since fallen, but are still likely to be higher this year than they were in 2019. Auto theft is surging nationally, but some cities, including Los Angeles, are experiencing a small decline. And rates for almost all types of crime have fallen since the early 1990s.
Voters’ opinions probably are being informed by partisanship, media portrayals — including an increase in neighborhood websites and email Listservs — and factors such as public homelessness, drug use, shoplifting and other signs of disorder, policy and political experts said.
Asher called the Gallup survey “the bane of [his] existence.” The results made so little sense to him that he abandoned a column he tried to write on the subject.
Although he tracks crime closely, he says it is nearly impossible to fully characterize national trends on safety in real time, in part because FBI data on violent crime can lag years behind and because it is difficult to define which offenses detract most from community security.
Cities such as Miami and Dallas that are in states with Republican governors appeared to get a boost in their reputations for safety compared with their crime statistics, while Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, which are in states with Democratic governors, took a hit, according to Anna Harvey, a political scientist who founded and directs the Public Safety Lab at New York University.
Republicans have painted Democratic-run cities as dens of crime and disorder since at least the 1960s. Candidates at the Republican presidential primary debate last month talked over one another to decry “hollowed-out cities,” a “national identity crisis” and Democrats who have been “talking about defunding the police for the last five years.”
Republican criticisms of Democratic big-city leaders have been bolstered by the claims of tech barons such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who have couched safety concerns as part of a broader argument against the “woke orientation of certain cities, their ungovernability,” said Richard Florida, a University of Toronto professor who has written extensively about trends in cities.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried to channel that energy in his presidential campaign, claiming in a recent video he posted from San Francisco that he had seen people defecating and using crack cocaine and other drugs on the street, and warning of a “collapse” resulting from “leftist policies.”
Fox News has reinforced those impressions with frequent segments on homelessness and drugs in big cities on the West Coast.
“The political rhetoric is public nuisance crimes,” Harvey said. “That may not be correlated with where the most serious violent crime is happening.”
Yet voters do have cause for concern, she and other experts say. They do not yet know whether homicide rates will continue to fall. Localized problems, including carjackings in New Orleans, rattle entire communities. Violent crimes, which appear to be falling, are still more common than they were in 2019, before the pandemic, the police murder of George Floyd, and the resulting mass protests, according to a July study by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice.
Harvey said Democrats should “come out swinging” in places where homicide and other violent crimes have subsided, such as Boston, L.A., Seattle and San Francisco, and be more vocal that crime in Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., represents “a serious policy problem” that “needs serious policies.”
“Just ignoring it or trying to change the subject is not going to be an effective tactic,” she said.
Democrats acknowledge that the public’s worries about crime are likely to hurt them more than they hurt the GOP, given that Democrats control the White House and most big-city governments.
Only 35% of respondents in an NPR/Marist survey conducted in March said President Biden was doing a good job when it came to handling crime — a lower mark than his already low approval rating. He earned similarly poor marks from people of color and those under 45, voters he needs to motivate if he wants to win reelection.
Jacksonville, Fla., has a good track record for moving homeless people off the streets. But as the city continues to grow, local builders and advocates worry about creating another housing crisis like the one in Los Angeles.
“What you’ve got to do is say, ‘Hey, I know it’s a serious issue and here’s what I’ve done,’” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has worked for Biden, citing as examples a mayor’s work in hiring police or taking guns off the street.
Republicans are not about to let up. Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, pointed to an effort by residents in the higher-income Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta earlier this year to secede from the city — a move that he said was driven by fear of crime.
Georgia has become a crucial swing state in presidential elections and in recent elections that determined control of the Senate. Ayres says that catapults the issue of crime into national importance, and he scoffs at those who say his party is overhyping it.
“Tell that to the people who are scared to go shopping at Lenox mall in Buckhead — they are not making that up,” he said. “And having some economist or political analyst downplay their fear is a good way to whistle past the graveyard for Democratic candidates.”
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