Murder, Shootings, Drugs, Shoplifting: CONSERVATIVE Areas Are Driving California’s Troubles

Seeing a daily barrage of trashings in national media blaming California’s progressives for crime, drugs, and violence? They get reality exactly backwards.

Rampaging mobs looting stores, streets littered with drug-stuffed bodies, cars smashed, failed gun laws… all blamed on “Soros”-installed district attorneys, left-wing legislators, softheaded judges, and “progressive” local policies.

It’s so backwards it’s comical.

In fact, the more conservative a California county, the more it suffers – by far – from the very problems Fox News, the Washington Examiner, New York Post, Atlantic Magazine, and national media herd blame on Golden State liberalism.

This reality becomes abundantly clear when California is divided into political categories. The most straightforward division: the 26 counties (total population 25 million) that voted Democratic by 2-1 margins in 2020 and 2022; the 10 counties (population 11 million) that voted Democratic in 2020’s presidential election but Republican in 2022’s off-year election; and the 22 counties (population 3 million) that voted 2-1 Republican in both 2020 and 2022.

Demographically, the hard-core Democratic counties are 37% Latinx, 35% White, 18% Asian, and 6% Black; the hard-core Republican counties are 50% White, 40% Latinx, 5% Asian, and 4% Black; and the locally-Republican counties in between.

When it comes to big troubles, the Republican counties suffer far and away the worst problems – and they’re getting even worse.

When it comes to big troubles, the Republican counties suffer far and away the worst problems – and they’re getting even worse. Unlike fraudulent, “cherry picked” political claims that select only certain years to show whatever trend partisans want, I use mathematical trendlines that incorporate all years in the period into a single trend in the following charts.

Remember the crime everyone used to fear: homicide? Republican California (the state’s safest area 20 years ago) has gone murder-crazy – homicide rates up 65%—and is now the most dangerous in the state. Meanwhile. Democratic California, which includes once-deadly Los Angeles, Oakland, etc., went from the most murder-prone to the safest (down 37%).

Figure 1. Homicide rates, California, 2000-2022. Source: Centers for Disease Control (2024).

You won’t see the Republican-murder crisis featured on Fox, nor that arch-Republican Kern County is the “murder capital of California.”

As the rightist media praises a rural sheriff for defying California’s strictest-in-the-nation gun laws, gun death rates in Republican counties have risen 24% over the last two decades, while falling 27% in Democratic cities. Today, residents of California’s Republican counties are 65% more likely to die by gunfire than those in Democratic counties. Still, California’s gun laws may be helping to protect conservatives from themselves. As high as hard-core Republican-county gun death rates are by California standards, they’re still much lower than in 35 American states, including arch-Republican Florida and Texas.

Figure 2. Firearms death rate, California, 2000-2022.

Widespread media features blame drug abuse, including fentanyl, on California’s supposedly liberal drug policies. Yes, urban California, led by San Francisco, has a serious street drug abuse crisis, which has received obsessive national and local attention. But, while everyone is doing badly (the drug toll in the rest of the U.S., up 380%, is rising even faster than California’s), California’s even deadlier Republican drug crisis has been completely ignored.

Figure 3. Illicit-drug death rate, California, 2000-2022.

Violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault), which has long plagued California’s major cities and those nationally, has fallen dramatically in California save in one type of area: Republican-governed.

Figure 4. Violent crime rates, California, 2000-2022. Source: California Department of Justice (2023).

Finally, shoplifting – yes, shoplifting, the outrage-crime of the 2020s – is nationally exploited to pillory San Francisco and other cities, which, after all, are major retail centers. Turns out, no one looked at actual crime statistics, which showed shoplifting is a much bigger problem in Republican counties and has actually declined faster to lower levels in Democratic areas. The shoplifting decline across California is largely attributable to the COVID-19 shutdowns; rates in 2023 are back to pre-pandemic levels, which are still much lower than rates in the 1980s and 1990s.

Figure 5. Shoplifting rates, California, 2000-2022.

The fact that national and some local media have grossly misrepresented California’s troubles as problems of liberal cities and governance also obscures some other unexpected findings. One is that conservative areas of California have resisted state reforms designed to reduce prison and jail populations ordered by courts in terms of higher imprisonment rates, but still show declines in incarceration similar to those in liberal areas (Figure 6). So, if large prisoner reductions (from around 170,000 in 2007 to 94,000 today) evidence some kind of soft-on-crime attitude, it is one prevailing across Left-to-Right areas of California.

Figure 6. Total prison and jail incarcerations per 100,000 residents, California, 2000-2022. Source: California Department of Corrections.

Those who claim the national media has a “liberal bias” must be joking. They clearly haven’t looked at crime and local-governance coverage. Consistently, media reporters and editors, whether employed by right-, mainstream-, or liberal-politics outlets, relentlessly blame progressive leaders for drugs and crime in their jurisdictions while universally exempting conservative leaders for much worse drug, crime, and violence trends in their bailiwicks. Rarely do media reporters actually analyze crime statistics; nearly all coverage is based on quips and anecdotes from self-interested sources.