Crime in the United States is the lowest in the last 30 years

By Ronny Rojas

During the Republican Convention they have tried to paint a bleak picture of the United States,  of a country plagued by crime. In some cases, speakers have even suggested that this has to do with immigration or undocumented immigrants.

On Wednesday night, one of those speeches was delivered by Sam Vigil, a man from Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose wife, a Colombian immigrant, was murdered in front of his home in November 2019. Vigil complained of crime in Albuquerque - one of the cities with the highest crime rates in the country - and praised the president, Donald Trump, for launching Operation Legend, which has deployed federal authorities in several cities to help local police fight crime.

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"It is a sad irony that Jackie immigrated to the United States seeking a better life than in her native Colombia, only to be shot at the entrance of her house," Vigil said, before saying that one of the alleged attackers is an "immigrant illegal".

While it is true that Vigil's case is a tragedy, the idea of ​​a country ravaged by crime, in which the local authorities cannot cope, is very far from the reality that the United States lives.

The United States has the lowest crime figures in at least the last 25 years. The decline in crime has remained constant in recent decades, long before Trump took office.

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For example, in 2018, the robbery rate per 100,000 residents was 376, a number almost three times lower than the rate of 987, recorded in 1995.

Likewise, the violent crime rate per 100,000 inhabitants for 2018 (368.9) was the second lowest since 1995, only higher than that of 2014 (361.6).

These numbers tone down the scenario that Republicans present to their voters. On Monday, the president of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Ronna McDaniel, warned about how "crime is increasing two, three and even four times in the big cities . "

Despite the fact that during the summer of 2020 the rate of homicides and other crimes grew in some cities, according to a report by the Council of Criminal Justice, these increases are not enough to erase the sustained decrease in crime in recent decades.

According to the Council of Criminal Justice, the increase in crime in some cities in recent months can be explained, in part, by the decrease in the legitimacy of the police in the wake of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis on May 25.

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Increased immigration does not increase the crime rate

The truth is that the decrease in crime in recent decades occurred while the number of immigrants living in the country increased: from 19.8 million in 1990 to 44.8 million in 2018.

Not only do the numbers show that the United States is a safer country than 30 years ago, contradicting Trump's political slogan - Let's Make America Safer - but multiple studies have ruled out that there is any relationship between crime and immigration.

In March 2018, the research site The Marshall Project conducted extensive data analysis that showed that there is no relationship between one thing and another.

Protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement protest in Kenoshe, Wisconsin, on August 24, 2020; after the shooting in which a police officer wounded a black man. AP

"The link between immigration and crime exists in the imagination of Americans, and nowhere else , " wrote the media, after determining that, in 136 metropolitan areas studied, the immigrant population grew between 1980 and 2016, while crime remained stable or decreased.

The same media made a similar analysis last year, in which it ruled out that there is any relationship between undocumented immigrants and criminality.

Various academic studies have shown that there is no relationship between the two phenomena. One of them, published in September 2019 by Christian Gunadi, an economist at the University of California, Riverside, found that the probability of undocumented immigrants going through a prison is 33 times lower than that of Native Americans.