Crime is rising rapidly in New York City due to a wave of President Joe Biden’s immigrants, and even National Public Radio (NPR) admits the trend.
NPR’s Morning Edition published a piece Thursday in an effort to run cover for Biden’s border crisis by attempting to diminish immigrant crime claims as “politically charged.”
In his May 9 article, NPR’s Martin Kaste insisted that the claim that immigrant crime is up is just right-wing politics being pushed by Republicans to get former President Donald Trump reelected to the White House in November.
“But national statistics show no sign of a migrant-driven crime wave. Violent crime is trending down, after the spikes of 2020-2021, even as migration has surged,” Kaste exclaims.
However, even in his own report, Kaste admits that many sources agree that crime is up.
Carlos Chaparro, who runs a vocational school in Queens, told NPR that “crime is up” over the last two years in his Latin American neighborhood.
“My clients say that when they leave [the school] at night, they’re being attacked and mugged, increasingly in the last year,” Chaparro added.
Kaste said he spoke to more than 20 people who also said that crime is up in their neighborhoods.
“It’s an everyday thing. People on the scooters, like driving by while you’re on the phone, they’ll take it. Every day, you walk here, you don’t know what’s gonna happen,” said Manhattan security guard Johnny Velasquez.
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Then there is the news of Tren de Aragua, the violent Venezuelan prison gang invading American shores, that is cutting a bloody and dangerous swath of crime and violence across the country.
Despite all this, NPR insists that “violent crime is trending down, after the spikes of 2020-2021, even as migration has surged.”
However, this claim has already been making news, and the discussion does not tend to prove NPR’s point. Most reporters have been relying on the FBI’s crime statistics to show national crime trends, and the FBI’s numbers do, indeed, show a falling crime rate.
However, it appears the reason for the softening crime rate is not that crime is actually falling but changes in the FBI’s reporting and the fact that far fewer police departments are even reporting crime to the Bureau.
The Coalition for Law Order and Safety, for one, released its report in April showing that crime is actually higher than what the FBI has been reporting, according to Fox News.
The reason for the discrepancy is “significant under-reporting of certain crimes.”
“There’s a series of caveats attached to the FBI data that the FBI doesn’t make as clear as they should,” said the group’s Sean Kennedy.
Kennedy added that in the wake of the George Floyd riots, many major police departments redefined some of the terms for violent crime, in many cases to artificially alter their crime statistics for political purposes.
“If you classify something as an aggravated assault, it’s a violent crime or a felony, but if you classify it as a simple assault, it’s then a misdemeanor and a non-violent crime,” Kennedy explained. “That is a world of difference when it comes to how the media is going to portray whether or not your department is fighting violent crime.”
Then there is the FBI itself. Fox News added that in 2019, 89 percent of municipal police departments sent their numbers to the Bureau. But during COVID, that reporting number fell to less than 63 percent of departments reporting their statistics. Cities including Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago did not submit any statistics at all in 2023.
With so much of its data missing entirely, it might seem obvious that the FBI’s numbers show decreases in crime.
Naturally, none of this was mentioned in the NPR article, which claimed that crime is down.
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