So, Donald, What About Rural Crime?
Donald Trump tries to divert MAGA from his good times with friend Jeffrey Epstein to “blue” city crime, ignoring criminality, suffering, and suicide among his rural supporters
So, Donald Trump says crime in the nation’s capital is out of control. Roving gangs of youth and the like.
Declaring it a public safety emergency, he invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which allows the president to take control of the city’s police force during an emergency for up to 30 days. He also deployed 800 National Guard troops, and then had them armed, just to increase tensions in a city where the crime rate has been dramatically dropping for the past couple of years.
Now, more than 2,200 guardsmen and women are picking up trash on the touristy streets, proving for the umpteenth time that everything Trump does is for show, including debasing the military.
Despite Trump’s baseless claims and nineteenth-century rhetoric about “bloodshed, bedlam, squalor, and worse,” crime rates in Washington, DC, the last big violent criminal activity in the nation’s capital most of us recall occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.
The six Republican governors who have sent additional National Guard troops to stand around and do little in the nicer parts of Washington, DC, have cities in their states with higher crime rates than the nation’s capital. Ohio, West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee each have at least one metropolitan area with more crime than one finds in DC.
Republicans would no doubt respond that those cities have Democratic mayors. (From 2016 to this year, 61–65 of the top 100 U.S. cities have had Democratic mayors.) Okay, but of the ten states with the highest murder rates, seven are Republican controlled.
What about the little-discussed crime in rural America? Some 80% of the population in the United States lives in urban areas, and the crime rates there are obviously higher. But crime in rural areas ain’t nothing — and much of it goes unreported for various reasons (e.g., more people know each other, the deputy sheriff is pals with the family of the alleged perpetrator).
A friend of mine — I’ll call him Mel because that’s his name and he’s a patriotic, devoted fighter of authoritarianism — recently posted some interesting statistics (yes, I know, real stats are verboten for fascists) about crime in America. Mel is a teacher and a former wrestling coach who spent his career teaching in rural schools.
So, let’s talk briefly about rural versus urban crime, Mel-style.
According to the non-partisan USAFacts, crime victimization rates are, as anyone would expect, higher in urban than in rural areas. In 2021, in urban areas, 24.5 out of 1,000 people above the age of 12 reported being victims of violent crime and 157.5 were victims of property crimes. In rural areas, those numbers were far lower, only 11.1 and 57.7, respectively. As you might imagine, the number of reported crimes in suburban areas fell right in between.
However, according to a 2023 paper published in JAMA Surgery, the “most rural” areas in this country have increasingly higher rates of death by firearm than the most urban areas. But it should be noted that suicide is, by far, more prevalent than homicide in both areas. If guns are present, suicide attempts are much more likely to be fatal. People in rural America simply have a lot more guns.
Still, the main takeaway is that overall crime victimization rates across America — urban and rural — have been dropping for decades: 58% lower in 2022 than in 1979.
Outside of an actual emergency, no city should see members of the National Guard on its streets. All citizens need a non-militarized, well-trained, well-paid, proportional police force to continue their work making the population feel safer.
And Republican leaders should remember that they, like many of us, are fathers and mothers and grandparents and rethink their hardline stance about the ludicrous, antiquated Second Amendment.
No other developed country in the world has to deal with its population being awash in guns. Parents should not have to worry about sending their children to school. Police officers should not always have to be on edge because they will likely encounter an armed person. Apart from Trump himself and the cowards in Congress and ideologues on the Supreme Court supporting his moves to dismantle our democracy, guns and homelessness are the true emergencies in this country.
Getting back to our less-discussed kind of crime, many people in rural areas, for cultural reasons touched on, choose not to report being a victim. Social services, like safe houses for abused women and their children, are often scarce in rural areas. So, how many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported in rural America? How many cases of domestic abuse?
Well, we have an idea. In 2015, 19% of people in urban areas who experienced rape or sexual assault reported it to police, but only 2% in rural areas did. That only about 1 in 5 women in urban areas report such crimes is really bad; that only 2 in 100 in rural areas do is abysmal. As Mel noted, “Underreporting is a significant issue in small communities.”
Mel’s post about crimes going unreported (and, thus, unpunished) in rural communities reminded me of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” published in 1892, in which Sherlock Holmes, after solving a case in the countryside, remarks to Dr. Watson that he feels more comfortable in London than in rural England, where the bucolic may hide the horrendous — a statement that, of course, astonishes Watson. Holmes, patient as always, explains:
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”
The ”poor ignorant folk” in Holmes’s mind were undereducated country people of nineteenth-century England. But how many smart, educated people living in small communities in rural America really know their rights and have access to legal help?
Donald Trump spews nothing but self-serving nonsense — often encouraging violence, with a wink and a smirk— and he’s done that all his life. To think that this man, with 34 felony convictions for fraud as well as jury judgments against him for sexual assault and defamation, is talking about the need to curb crime is beyond absurd. It would be like Trump’s old confidante (Trump wrote they shared “wonderful” secrets) Jeffrey Epstein counseling us on the dangers of pedophiles.
And consider what an immense waste of taxpayers’ money all this deployment of the guard is. Where is the Republican outrage about that? The so-called red states’ so-called governors who have curried favor with Trump by sending guardsmen to DC should be ashamed of themselves.
This essay later appeared on Salon.com.
