Peach Tree Times

In an op-ed for the New York Post, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims the U.S. has seen a significant increase in violent crime, and new FBI crime data and survey data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) found violent crime and the murder rate both increased in 2021. Reuters sees the GOP taking the House and Senate because of the statistics on crime. 

In a separate op-ed for the Hill, Ronna McDaniel accuses Sen. Rafael Warnock of not doing enough for Georgian citizens and allowing crime to continue to increase in major cities like Atlanta. Supporting the position, the FBI Crime Data Explorer points out that in 2019 there were 448,783 violent crime incidents across the county, and 520,209 offenses reported by 9,042 law enforcement agencies. By 2021, those same numbers had risen to 694,050 violent crime incidents, and 817,020 offenses reported by 11,794 law enforcement agencies. 

In her Hill op-ed, McDaniel maintains that Warnock “lobbied for the end of Atlanta’s bail system, which led to an approximate 100% spike in released offenders failing to appear for their court dates. He’s voted to confirm Biden’s soft-on-crime Supreme Court pick. He’s demonized our men and women in blue, calling them 'thugs' and 'bullies.' He’s even voted to give stimulus checks to prisoners, including the Boston Marathon Bomber.”

McDaniel maintains that Republican challenger Herschel Walker would prove to be a better option for Georgia voters, and data from the NCVS by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the nation’s largest crime survey, may bear this out. According to an article by Jeffrey H. Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative, published in the City Journal, there was a nearly 30% jump in violence from 2017 to 2021. 

“According to the NCVS, which dates to the Nixon administration, the rate of violent crime rose only in urban areas,” Anderson wrote in the article. “It did not change to a statistically significant degree in suburban or rural areas.”

However, the article did note that murders rose by 27% in 2020, the largest jump in more than a century, though it noted the 2020 data from NCVS could be impacted by the pandemic. 

“Thus, comparisons between overall pre-2020 NCVS crime rates and the 2020 and 2021 crime rates are probably not as reliable as one might hope,” Anderson wrote in the article.  

However, in the New York Post op-ed, Sessions points the finger for rising crime at Democrats, who he claims have turned their backs on polices proven to work and replaced them with failed changes, citing the "Left's woke policies."

“Tragically, they (Democrats) ignored the warnings of law enforcement officials and abandoned policies shown to work, replacing them with naïveté and wishful thinking,” he wrote. “The results are now clear for all to see.” 

Moreover, in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, Republicans have gained an advantage on crime and immigration as the midterm elections approach, according to a report by Reuters. In the poll, conducted from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, 39% of registered voters said they would pick a Republican to “solve crime” while 30% would go with a Democrat. 

“A lot of voters care about crime and a lot of voters care about immigration…Right now, those are winning issues for Republicans,” Alex Conant told the website.