Newsom’s claim that Trump states have the highest murder rates

[Flash]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]Newsom made these remarks in the course of a broad discussion with Cohen that “red” states — those that voted for Donald Trump — do more poorly than “blue” states that supported President Biden in the 2020 election. [/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]According to Newsom spokesman Nathan Click, Newsom’s statistics are derived from reports released in 2022 and this year by Third Way, a left-leaning policy group, about the “red state murder problem.” The first report, using annual crime statistics released by state governments, said eight of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for Trump. The most recent report, relying on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that “solidly red states have dominated the top 10 murder rate states for the past decade — some for each of the last 21 years.”[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]The CDC data shows that in 2019, eight of the top 10 states voted for Trump; in 2020, seven of the top 10 did. The report said the gap in murder rates between red and blue states has widened, from a low of nine percentage points in 2003 and 2004 to a high of 44 percentage points in 2019.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]But there’s an interesting pattern when you look at the top 10 states. Experts question whether politics, as opposed to social conditions, is a deciding factor in the high homicide rates — though, of course, social conditions can be reflected in the politics of a state.[/FONT]

Blue vs. red

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]First of all, using the 2020 electoral college map as a proxy for blue and red states glosses over whether Democrats or Republicans run individual states.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]The top 10 states by murder rate in 2020 were Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Maryland and Georgia. The last three are listed by Third Way as “blue” states, though Georgia only narrowly voted for Biden in 2020.

[/FONT][FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]In fact, 2020 was the first time since 1992, when Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was on the ballot, that Georgia supported a Democrat for president. The political leaders running the state are all Republicans (even if both senators are Democrats). So it’s questionable whether Georgia is really blue. Meanwhile, Maryland had a Republican governor in 2020. But it’s also listed by Third Way as blue because its electoral votes went to Biden.[/FONT]
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The noteworthy fact about the top 10 list is that, with the exception of Illinois, all of these states during the Civil War were either in the Confederacy or were border states (Missouri and Maryland). Yes, the war ended more than 150 years ago. But a cultural milieu can take a long time to change.[/FONT]

The South’s historically high homicide rates

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]We dug into the records to see which states would have ranked in the top 10 in terms of homicide rates in 1960 and 1965. In 1965, six of the same states would be on the list: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. The same would hold true for the three-year period of 1959-1961, according to a 1967 CDC report.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]The 1967 CDC report broke up the statistics by region — and the area with the highest murder rates were in the old Confederacy. The three regions that include the Confederacy and border states had murder rates per 100,000 people of 7.3, 8.2 and 8.3 — compared with a national average of 4.7. The South brought up the average for the rest of the country; New England, for instance, had a rate of 1.4 and the Pacific Coast had a rate of 3.8.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]In the 1960s, the electoral college geography was much different from what it is today. Much of the South, now red, solidly voted for Democrats — back when segregationists had an important power base in the party. The Pacific Coast, now considered a blue bastion, usually voted for Republicans.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]Criminologists are not surprised by this pattern. “If politics plays a role, it’s a minor role,” said Tod Burke, a former police officer and professor emeritus in the Department of Criminal Justice at Radford University. He said the South traditionally has had higher poverty rates, more economic disadvantages and a culture of guns that leads to more violence. He also said that even the weather may play a bigger role than politics. “Tempers are more likely to flare when it’s hot,” he said. (A 2012 Harvard study, based on 50 years of weather and crime data for 2,972 U.S. counties, found a linear relationship between hot weather and violent crime.)[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]“The most common criminology explanation is probably the ‘subculture of violence’ theory — which argues that those who migrated to the South (especially from Scotland) brought with them cultural values that put a huge premium on protecting respect — which among other things resulted in the ‘dueling culture,’” Gary LaFree, a professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at the University of Maryland, said in an email.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]Elijah Anderson, a Yale University sociology professor and author of “Code of the Street,” agreed that a subculture of violence plays a large role. “Basically the politics doesn’t matter much,” Anderson said. “It is the social conditions that impacts this violence.” He said that residents of Southern states have traditionally been skeptical of state authority and the criminal justice system and take matters into their own hands. He said the stereotype of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys in the late 1800s to some extent still holds true.[/FONT]
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A 1996 study on the Southern “culture of honor,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, described three experiments in which White males attending the University of Michigan were insulted by a friend who bumped into them. Northerners tended to shrug off the insult but “southerners were (a) more likely to think their masculine reputation was threatened, (b) more upset (as shown by a rise in cortisol levels), (c) more physiologically primed for aggression (as shown by a rise in testosterone levels), (d) more cognitively primed for aggression, and (e) more likely to engage in aggressive and dominant behavior.”[/FONT]

Third Way’s response

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice president for policy and co-author of the reports, said the group produced them in response to what he described as a drumbeat of false claims about high crime in blue states in Republican television ads and on right-wing media. He said that few people have direct experience with crime, and so they are mainly exposed to it through the media, which decides what crimes to highlight on television. So the group set out to challenge perceptions framed by the media.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]“For most people, this was a shock,” said Kessler, who is not related to The Fact Checker. He believes that widespread gun ownership, higher poverty rates, lower educational attainment and less spending on social services — attributes of states that largely voted for Trump — are the primary reasons for higher murder rates. The six states that made the top 10 list in the 1960s are today among the 12 states with the highest poverty rates.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]He acknowledged, however, that the pattern is not always consistent. High gun ownership or poverty does not always equate to high murder rates. For instance, Idaho, a Trump state, is in the bottom six for homicide, according to the CDC. It has the fourth-highest gun ownership and ranks 35th for poverty.[/FONT]
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In response to critics who say the murder rates in red states are high because of “blue” cities run by Democrats (such as St. Louis and Kansas City in Missouri or New Orleans in Louisiana), Kessler said the list does not change if the county that contains the largest city in each state is removed from the data. He also argues that in many red states, Democratic-leaning areas often are starved for funding, making it harder to combat crime.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]Kessler dismissed the fact that the patterns have been similar for decades. “An Alabama with George Wallace as governor is not the same state that voted for Democrats back then,” he said.[/FONT]
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Click, Newsom’s spokesman, said in an email that his point is that “Fox News and Republicans are lying when they try to paint blue states like California or New York as lawless, violent crime capitals of America.” As for historical patterns, he said, “The same report cited above notes that the murder rate in these red states and blue states have widened over the last two decades.”[/FONT]

The Bottom Line

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]The political geography was more jumbled 60 years ago. Since then, conservative Democrats became Republicans and liberal Republicans became Democrats. New England became solidly Democratic, while the South became a Republican stronghold. Fewer states today even have senators from different parties — or vote differently from presidential election to presidential election.[/FONT]

[FONT=var(--wpds-fonts-body)]Newsom’s use of the 2020 electoral map to make his case leaves out important context — that many of the states on the top 10 list today have been on the list for decades, regardless of whether they voted for the Republican candidate for president. As the country splits increasingly into red and blue zones, a possible widening of the gap in murder rates could become a more relevant marker in different styles of governance.[/FONT]

 

[Walt]

It is expected that cities have higher murder rates than rural areas, because people come in more contact with other people in the cities, but recently that has been turned on its head. Cities like San Francisco and New York have much lower murder rates than the country in general, while rural trump counties have seen explosions in murder.

Another fact that the alt right does not want to talk about is that the opioid epidemic mostly did not touch Blacks, and Democrats in general...

 

[Flash]

It is expected that cities have higher murder rates than rural areas, because people come in more contact with other people in the cities, but recently that has been turned on its head. Cities like San Francisco and New York have much lower murder rates than the country in general, while rural trump counties have seen explosions in murder.

Another fact that the alt right does not want to talk about is that the opioid epidemic mostly did not touch Blacks, and Democrats in general...

This stat surprised me. "In response to critics who say the murder rates in red states are high because of “blue” cities run by Democrats (such as St. Louis and Kansas City in Missouri or New Orleans in Louisiana), Kessler said the list does not change if the county that contains the largest city in each state is removed from the data."

 

[Walt]

This stat surprised me. "In response to critics who say the murder rates in red states are high because of “blue” cities run by Democrats (such as St. Louis and Kansas City in Missouri or New Orleans in Louisiana), Kessler said the list does not change if the county that contains the largest city in each state is removed from the data."

In the last 30 years, the murder rate in America's biggest cities has gone down, but that has been offset by a rising murder rate in rural areas.

 

[cawacko]

It is expected that cities have higher murder rates than rural areas, because people come in more contact with other people in the cities, but recently that has been turned on its head. Cities like San Francisco and New York have much lower murder rates than the country in general, while rural trump counties have seen explosions in murder.

Another fact that the alt right does not want to talk about is that the opioid epidemic mostly did not touch Blacks, and Democrats in general...

Never been to San Francisco huh?

 

[cawacko]

It is expected that cities have higher murder rates than rural areas, because people come in more contact with other people in the cities, but recently that has been turned on its head. Cities like San Francisco and New York have much lower murder rates than the country in general, while rural trump counties have seen explosions in murder.

Another fact that the alt right does not want to talk about is that the opioid epidemic mostly did not touch Blacks, and Democrats in general...

Is Harvard lying?


Opioid addiction and overdoses are increasingly harming Black communities

Rising opioid deaths in Black communities can be linked to health disparities.


The opioid epidemic caused half a million deaths between 1999 and 2019. But far from abating, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused it to dramatically spike, with more people dying of opioids last year than in any prior year. Yet the contours of the crisis have changed.

The opioid epidemic has traditionally been thought of as one that mostly affects white Americans, and largely in rural areas. This was partly intentional, since pharmaceutical companies targeted these areas to avoid the glare of law enforcement agencies. Another reason why white Americans were more likely to be addicted to opioids was because Black people were much less likely to be prescribed opioids for pain control, even when medically indicated in emergent conditions. However, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the reason the opioid epidemic is now growing at breakneck pace is because of its rapid infiltration into Black communities.

New research highlights more Black Americans are dying of overdoses

A recently published report from the CDC provides a stark view of how the opioid epidemic is increasingly ensnaring Black people in its vise. In 2020, opioid overdoses rose 30% compared to 2019, leading to 91,799 deaths. However, the increase was not uniformly noted. The death rate among Black Americans increased by 44%, the greatest increase among all racial and ethnic groups, and double that for white Americans.

Young Black people between the ages of 15 and 24 saw an 86% increase in opioid death rate. In fact, according to my analysis of the CDC WONDER database, in 2020 Black Americans had a greater death rate from opioids than white Americans for the first time during the entire two-decade history of the opioid crisis.

chart showing death rates from opioids from 2001 to 2020, with a blue line for whites and a red line for blacks
In 2020, for the first time during the entire opioid epidemic, the death rate from opioid overdoses was greater for Black Americans than white Americans, in large part due to the surge in illicit fentanyl.

Opioid deaths add to the systemic burdens on Black communities

One of the Black victims of opioid addiction was George Floyd. "Our story, it’s a classic story of how many people get addicted to opioids," Courteney Ross, Floyd’s girlfriend, testified during the trial in Minneapolis. "We both struggled from chronic pain. Mine was in my neck and his was in his back." In fact, opioids could very well have killed George Floyd prior to his murder in May 2020; he was hospitalized for an opioid overdose in March of that year.

At a time when Black communities are suffering disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality, they are also being doubly battered by the ongoing opioid epidemic. The opioid epidemic is compounding the existing inequities in the United States: the CDC study shows that the areas with the greatest degree of income inequality had double the death rate from opioids among Black Americans compared to areas with the least income inequality.

What is causing this increase in opioid deaths?

Why has opioid misuse surged among Black Americans during the pandemic? A key culprit is the rise of fentanyl, an opioid that is far more lethal than others, which has overrun America through rampant export from overseas. Research my team published in JAMA showed that the pandemic was associated with a drop in medical prescriptions for opioids, with subsequent work suggesting this only occurred for new users rather than for those previously prescribed opioids.

This reduction occurred because of the closures of clinics and pharmacies, yet abrupt stoppage of prescription opioids can be dangerous. A recent study showed that patients whose opioids are suddenly stopped have a higher risk of suicide, since it may induce them to turn to illicit opioids like heroin and fentanyl.

Unequal access to addiction treatment compounds the problem
A major reason for the growing racial divide in opioids is based on who actually gets access to substance use treatment. While only 14% of those who died of opioids received treatment for substance misuse overall, among Black Americans the proportion was 8%, the lowest of all groups. Treatment services for opioid use disorder were severely hit by the pandemic, leading to abrupt closures of services that were serving as lifelines for many users.

Policy changes and better access to pain treatments could turn the tide

Simply making resources available for substance use and mental health are unlikely to move the needle by themselves. Opioid death rates among Black Americans were highest in areas with the greatest availability of addiction and mental health treatment centers. What is really needed is a broad public health campaign and outreach to Black communities highlighting the dangers of opioid misuse, providing community-based resources for harm reduction and addiction treatment, and reducing the stigma associated with opioid misuse and seeking treatment.

The War on Drugs was revealed by one of its originators as being racist in nature. The last thing we need is for us to again criminalize the use and misuse of these drugs, which could put already vulnerable Black communities — disproportionately affected by opioids and overzealous law enforcement — in double jeopardy. Ridding the streets of fentanyl through more stringent scrutiny is an important part of the National Drug Control Strategy released earlier in the year by the Biden administration, but care must also be taken to ensure that Black Americans who experience pain, or who have been prescribed chronic opioids, are not left to suffer.

Interdisciplinary pain treatments that are evidence-based can provide significant relief for people in chronic pain, and an important goal needs to be ensuring that all patients, particularly those who are already suffering disproportionately, receive access to these therapies. Yet to ensure that Black people are both able to get appropriate pain relief, and also do not suffer disproportionately from the opioid epidemic, we need to ensure that barriers to treatment are eliminated once and for all.


https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog...singly-harming-black-communities-202208152800

 

[cawacko]

This article is from last year.

This is just a weird claim to make. "Another fact that the alt right does not want to talk about is that the opioid epidemic mostly did not touch Blacks, and Democrats in general..."

The whole opioid crisis is sad but does ignoring that it's happening to certain people or areas serve any purpose for them?




Black Americans are now dying from drug overdoses at a higher rate than whites



When the first phase of the opioid epidemic was cresting in 2010, driven largely by prescription pain medications, white Americans were dying of fatal drug overdoses at rates twice that of Black Americans.

In the decade that followed, drug deaths surged again. But this time Black communities faced the brunt of the carnage.

"Overdose rates have been growing fastest among Black communities," says Joseph Friedman, an addiction researcher at UCLA. "For the first time we see them overtaking the overdose rate among white individuals."

It's a devastating milestone, documented in a peer-reviewed study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

The research is based on drug deaths from 1999 through 2020, the most recent comprehensive overdose data available.

The biggest factor leading to overdose deaths among Black people is a more toxic illicit drug supply

Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests the situation has grown even worse over the past year as fatal overdoses topped 100,000 for the first time in 2021.

Friedman says the biggest factor leading to dramatically higher overdose deaths among Black people with substance use disorder is pretty simple: "The illicit drug supply, the street drug supply, is becoming more and more toxic," he says.

That's because of fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid, which Mexican drug cartels now mix into many of the street drugs sold in the U.S.

Fentanyl has made drug use far deadlier for all Americans, across all demographics.

But this new study suggests African Americans are more vulnerable because they often rely on illicit drug supplies that are even more high-risk.

"People who are lower down on the social hierarchy tend to be exposed to fentanyl and other highly potent synthetic opioids at disproportionate rates," says Dr. Helena Hansen, a co-author of the report.

As a consequence, "You find Black Americans are exposed to fentanyl more often than white Americans," she says.

Black Americans with addiction more vulnerable to fentanyl

Hansen, who is Black, is also a researcher at UCLA. She says African Americans with substance use disorder also frequently lack access to healthcare and drug treatment. They're arrested and incarcerated at a far higher rates.

This means they tend to have fewer chances to get healthy and the avoid relapses that expose drug users to fentanyl.

"We have in this country two tiers, a criminalized tier which still over-polices and over-arrests and over-incarcerates Black and brown Americans," Hansen says. "And then we have a medicalized tier" that's more available in white communities.


Another 1.2 million drug deaths forecast across all demographics

This research follows a study published last month in the medical journal the Lancet that forecast more than 1.2 million additional drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in the coming decade.

On reviewing the demographic study conducted at UCLA, Dr. Stephen Taylor with the American Society of Addiction Medicine says the data suggest the Black community may bear the brunt of the next phase of the opioid epidemic.

"As a member of the Black community and as an addiction treatment specialist ... I'm terrified of that prospect, but that's exactly what we could be facing," Taylor says.

"A larger percentage of this next million [deaths] will be Black and other people of color."

Researchers say the way to prevent many of those deaths in the Black community is well documented in scientific and medical literature: provide better healthcare and more access to addiction treatment.

"All of this needs to be done with a real sense of urgency," Taylor says.


https://www.npr.org/2022/03/02/1083838947/black-americans-dying-drug-overdoses

 

[T. A. Gardner]

By the CDC's own stats, of the murder rate in the top 10 states, 3 are blue (N. Mexico, Illinois, and Maryland)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm

Given that we know that Blacks commit a disproportionate number of murders to their numbers in the population, and that all but one (N. Mexico) of the top 10 murder states has an exceptionally large Black population...

I'd say the connection is more about the concentration of Blacks in a region, city, or state, than about the state as a whole being blue or red. N. Mexico remains the sole outlier in this.

The conclusion I'd draw is that it is Blacks primarily driving this murder rate, and Blacks overwhelmingly--almost entirely--vote Democrat.