The Red State Murder Problem Hoax

Examining Third Way’s partisan hackery

Third Way bills itself as a new kind of organization. Unabashedly center-left, it hopes to forge solutions that average Americans can support, a new kind of thinking to solve real problems.

“Our competitive advantage lies in our high-impact advocacy campaigns that combine rigorous policy research with a unique and incisive understanding of the vast American middle…”

Their actions speak otherwise because their “rigorous policy research” is misleading. The organization published a report and spent the last year banging a drum trying to disprove the Republican crime narrative of dangerous liberal cities. They followed up again in January with an expansion on their theme. Their central argument, that crime is higher in red states, may be technically true but disproves nothing.

Somehow, we are to believe the Trumpy-ness of these states elevates the homicide rate above that of the blue states. Don’t look at the cities, nothing to see here, murders increased, everywhere, across urban, suburban, and rural areas. Ignore decades-old research; this has got to be a Republican “Red State” problem.

Ultimately, there are two main problems:

1. Third Way’s state-level analysis is deeply flawed, ignoring most city contributions and using amateurish corrections to give an illusion of fairness
2. The authors didn’t bother with or ignored longstanding research on regional crime variation, preferring to blame Republicans

Deconstructing the states

Third Way makes a fundamental statistical mistake in choosing the wrong unit of analysis. State-level doesn’t work when differences are sharply delineated by locality. The organization big-heartedly claims to give red states a boost by excluding the county containing the largest city, but this ham-handed adjustment fixes little.

Louisiana, second on Third Way’s murder list, illustrates the deceptive nature of the analysis; the study should at least have been done at the county level. Of 64 parishes in the Pelican state, just 10 went for Biden in 2020, with a combined population nearing 1.2 million in 2021. A quick internet search for 2021 homicides shows that three of these blue parishes contributed 479 homicides, with Caddo (Shreveport) at 91, East Baton Rouge (Baton Rouge) at 170, and Orleans (New Orleans) at 218. The CDC estimates 20.4 per 100,000 for the 2021 state homicide rate, which means roughly 943 murders that year.

These three blue parishes account for 25 percent of the population but 50 percent of the murders. Blue Louisiana’s murder rate comes in at 40.4, while red Louisiana’s registers at 13.5.

But wait! it gets worse. New Orleans and Orleans Parish are one and the same, but Baton Rouge, 149 homicides, and Shreveport, 91 homicides, don’t fill up their parishes. The three blue cities account for 438 of Louisiana’s estimated 943 killings, with remarkably similar murder rates of 49.5, 58, and 57.8, respectively based on their 2021 population. They combine for a blue-city murder rate of 55.9, leaving the rest of the state at 13.1.

Sure, Louisiana is a Republican stronghold, and it does have a high non-city murder rate, but that doesn’t destroy the narrative of high-crime cities. Because the narrative is true.

Similar analysis works in other red states. The CDC estimates a crude homicide rate in Missouri of 11.6 for the twelve months ending Q4 of 2021, or about 716 murders. The Kansas City (157 homicides) rate 0f 30.9 and St. Louis (200 homicides) rate of 68.2 produce a big blue city murder rate of 44.5, leaving the rest of the state at 6.7. Third Way’s methodology of leaving out larger Kansas City while keeping in smaller St. Louis, which had even more murders, didn’t really fix the problem it claimed to fix. Red Missouri isn’t a bad place to live.

Because of the way Democrat votes are distributed, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas don’t lend themselves to this rough-and-ready method because data is not as easily available. Still, consider Republican-led Huntsville, Alabama, with 25 murders in 2021 versus similarly sized and deep blue Birmingham Alabama with 132, not to mention Montgomery at 77 and Mobile clocking at 51. Maybe some national think tank can step in with legitimate analysis?

Ignoring history and research

The poor data analysis may even pale in comparison to the failure to do a literature review.

Over fifty years ago, in 1969, Sheldon Hackney published “Southern Violence” in The American Historical Review. He noted very high rates of violence in the black community and somewhat high rates of violence in the white community in comparison to their black and white Northern peers. He dismissed most hypotheses and suggested:

Some effort must be made to determine when the South became violent; timing may reveal much about the relationship of slavery to violence. The possible effects of Scotch- Irish immigration, population density, temperature, and religious fundamentalism should be investigated with quantitative methods.

Raymond Gastil followed up on Hackney’s research in 1972, concluding Southern culture accounted for much of the murder disparities. Further, states with greater numbers of Southerners arriving during the Great Migration also faced increases in crime.

Cultural violence in the South is almost certainly related to slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction. Structural/cultural remnants today plague both black and white Americans, and in most of the states of the old South lead to a higher baseline homicide rate. These are most of the states identified in Third Way’s top ten bad-boy list, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and (blue) Georgia. Add in border/slave states Missouri and (blue) Maryland, and one can check off nine of the top ten.

In truth, fifty years of research points to Southerners of all races, both urban and rural, just being a little more violent than the rest of the country, regardless of how they happen to be voting in a given year.

The higher baseline of Southern violence is the reason why Louisiana’s rural murder rate is at 13.1, while Montana’s rural murder rate is probably as close to zero as one can reasonably get. This has very little to do with policies pursued by Republican administrations over the last twenty years. If it did, Washington D.C. would be a paradise and Utah would be a cesspool.

One could be tempted to argue that red-state, as used in the author’s “Red State Crime Problem” wasn’t meant to imply cause and effect. Maybe they are just pointing out a coincidence and trying to get Republicans to work on their own problems? Probably not.

While the writers claim to disdain demagoguery, they provide a list of causes aligning with liberal priorities. First, guns are the problem; there are more guns in red states than in blue states, which causes murder. So why do the VERY well-armed red counties in Louisiana, Missouri, and other states have far lower homicide rates than the cities? Why do guns cause so many murders on the South Side of Chicago, but not as many in the northern part of the city? Fun fact, in liberal Oregon, 51% of households have guns.

Poverty and low educational attainment are also addressed as causes because both are linked to poverty and, supposedly, are more prevalent in red states. Republican states are poor and uneducated therefore they have more murders. Again, the problem needs far more rigorous analysis. Are we talking about poverty and broken education systems in Kansas City and St. Louis? Or are the rural uneducated and poor somehow causing the homicides in the blue cities?

Finally, Third Way trots out money. Blue states spend more on police and social services. But taking a look at the handy map embedded in an article from the Urban Institute, the pattern doesn’t really hold up. Again, why isn’t D.C. a paradise and why haven’t Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, and others reverted to a state of nature?

Where to go from here

The faux state-level rankings aren’t the only distortions. Consider this gem from Third Way’s 2022 report when talking about 2019 to 2020 crime increases:

Three of the five states with the largest increase in murder rate were Trump-voting Wyoming at 91.7%, South Dakota at 69%, and Nebraska at 59.1%.

According to Third Way’s data, Wyoming’s murders jumped from 12 to 23. So what? One-year changes in small numbers don’t have much meaning, and even at a 4 per 100,000 murder rate in Wyoming, it is still one of the safest states in the country. Every life is important, but homicides in Wyoming are background noise.

Rival gangs aren’t doing drive-by shootings on the mean streets of Casper, Laramie, and Cheyenne as they try to secure their drug territory. Do you know what they call 25 murders in Chicago? A long weekend.

It’s a shame that rather than doing thoughtful, honest analyses, the think tank throws up partisan clickbait specifically designed to be posted on Twitter as if there was real research behind it.

Red States Bad! Blue States Good!

In reality, the violent crime problems is far more complex than which party administers a city or state. Crime is at the intersection of poverty and lack of opportunity. Opportunity is enhanced by good schools, two-parent families, childhood nutrition, community/extended family support, and a host of other factors. Crime ebbs and flows with the economy; good policing, strong prosecutors, and procedural justice can reduce crime, while poor policing leads to a lack of trust in institutions and lawlessness. Urban density, in and of itself, contributes to crime. Neither Democrats nor Republicans created these problems; urban and Southern crime existed long before the 1970s when Blacks began to vote overwhelmingly D and the White South started voting for the Rs.

That said, it’s fair to question the effectiveness of soft-on-crime District Attorneys. Is the quality of life going up in jurisdictions of Soros-funded DAs? Do the residents of Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles feel they are safer with the progressives in charge? Rock-solid research could either make or disprove the case. Too bad we can’t expect that from Third Way.

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Brian E. Wish works as a quality engineer in the aerospace industry. He has spent 31 years active and reserve in the US Air Force. He has a bachelor’s from the US Air Force Academy, a master’s from Bowie State, and a Ph.D. in Public and Urban Administration from UT Arlington. The opinions expressed here are his own. Check out brianewish.com. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.