Fox News called out as 'disgraceful garbage' over crime claim

05 March 2024

In a Super Tuesday segment on crime, Fox News reporter Katie Pavlich claimed “crime is up,” despite multiple reports, including FBI statistics, that show over the past two years crime has plummeted.

“Homicides dropped by over 10% in America’s biggest cities in 2023,” CNN reported in January.

“Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. — even if Americans don’t believe it,” NPRreported last month.

“America’s Peace Wave,” was the late December 2023 headline at The Atlantic, which reported, “Sky-high violent-crime rates of recent years have suddenly—mercifully—plummeted.”

“Crime in almost every category went down across U.S. in 2023, FBI reports,” according to NBC News in December of 2023. Days earlier, NBC reported: “Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong.”

“Crime on the Decline” The New York Times reported in an article originally titled, “U.S. Crime Rate Fell in 2023.”

According to The Times, “the data over the past year has offered a much more optimistic picture. The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent — which would be the biggest national decline on record. The spike that started in 2020 now looks more like a blip, and the murder rate is lower than it was during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The recent data also suggests that the violent-crime rate in 2023 was near its lowest level in more than 50 years, as Jeff Asher, a crime analyst, wrote for his newsletter.”

But according to Fox News, the statistics are wrong.

Fox News’ John Roberts on Tuesday told Pavlich, “you made the point that one of the reasons for declining crime is that a lot of these soft on crime prosecutors are either reducing charges, letting people out with no charges or declining to prosecute more serious crimes.”

But the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) isn’t a report on charges or prosecutions, it’s a report of reported crimes.

“Exactly,” Pavlich agreed, before suggesting the statistics are intentionally wrong. “I mean that statistics are only reflective of what is put into the system, right? So if you have a number of prosecutors across the country who are downgrading serious felonies, to misdemeanors that makes it look like violent crime or burglaries like you’re seeing on the side of your screen that are taking place aren’t really happening.”

“But when you go outside and walk around in these cities, or you ask people, they will say they know somebody who’s been a victim of a crime or they’ve been in a store like this where people come in and they grab all these goods, and then that of course deteriorates into a bigger situation where stores leave, there is no economic opportunity in certain neighborhoods, and therefore there is even more crime that continues to occur in the spiral. And so this is something that both Donald Trump is talking about and Joe Biden,” Pavlich said.

“Donald Trump when he was in office, he had operation LEGEND which of course was a partnership between the Department of Justice and local law enforcement, local mayor’s offices, to try and solve murders, for example, and to put federal charges onto some of these criminals because a local D.A. charges really weren’t enough to scare them into not going into these repeat offender situations.”

“So we’ll see more of this as the campaign moves on, but in terms of what has been happening over the past three years crime is up,” Pavlich insisted. “People are feeling it.”

Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, called the Fox News segment “vibes-based analysis.”

Teddy Wilson, who reports on the radical right via his Substack newsletter, writes: “This rhetoric is part of a much larger narrative perpetuated by right-wing media and GOP politicians, and is connected to anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

“The Message: White people in the suburbs should be afraid, because the scary Black and Brown people are coming to your neighborhood.”

Indeed, Media Matters last week reported, “Fox News’ attempt to manufacture a Biden crime crisis runs into a problem: Violent crime is down.”

Longtime journalist John Harwood, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NBC News, and CNN, wrote, “so when they’re going up, crime stats are real when they’re going down, the stats are fake instead, they’ll just use random videos of crimes by members of minority groups.”

He concluded: “disgraceful garbage enterprise.”

Watch the Fox News segment below or at this link.

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