Las Vegas City Wire

Around the country, communities are seeing crime rates rise drastically. In Nevada, the story is much of the same. Major cities, which have high concentrations of minority groups, are experiencing the highest crime rates. 

While reducing crime rates disproportionately benefits minority communities, many communities are actually suffering from very high crime rates that have only risen in the last few years. 

In 2020, there were a total of 460 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 people in Nevada, higher than the national average of 399 per 100,000. In 2021, violent crime dropped 13% overall in Clark County, but the murder rate increased by 48% in that timespan.

Michael Goodwin, a columnist for the New York Post, said, "The nation’s large cities are so swamped by horrific crime and violence that police, criminologists and a few honest elected Democrats are finally conceding the obvious: the progressive movement, including Black Lives Matter, that ostensibly aimed to protect minority racial groups by defunding the police and coddling criminals backfired big time."

Nationally in 2020, Black people were disproportionately murdered at a higher rate than White people. According to several outlets such as Fox News, this has a lot to do with the Defund the Police movement, which is an anti-police movement that arose from the Black Lives Matter movement. 

In his column, Goodwin said, "the people the progressives claimed to be helping actually were harmed by the anti-police, pro-criminal policies."

Since the protests, the FBI has reported that the murders of Black Americans rose 33% from 2019 to 2020. Between 2010 and 2019, Black murders increased by a total of 43%. In 2020, the uS recorded the largest single-year increase in murder rate than at any time in the past 60 years. 

In Clark County, home to Las Vegas, overall violent crime dropped 13% in 2021. However, the murder rate increased by 48% in that area, compared to 2020. 

Current trends have very real implications for Democrats hoping to get elected during this cycle. Democrats are notoriously weak on crime from a public standpoint and means that Republicans are likely to do well in jurisdictions where crime is rising significantly.