Voters are ALARMED by high crime rates, winning Republicans votes from ‘soft-on-crime’ Democrats
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According to a recent study, Alaska, New Mexico and Tennessee have the highest rates of murder, rape and other violent crime in the US, while Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have the lowest rates.
Alaska topped the list with 837.8 violent crimes committed per 100,000 people, according to a 2020 breakdown of FBI data on US murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and assault rates.
It was followed by New Mexico, with 778.2 violent crimes per 100,000 people, then Tennessee, with 672.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people — all well above the national average of 398.5 crimes for every 100,000 people.
At the other end of the spectrum were three northern states: Maine, with only 108.6 violent crimes per 100,000 people, followed by New Hampshire (146.4 violent crimes per 100,000 people) and Vermont (173.4 violent crimes per 100,000 people).
Alaska has long had one of the highest crime rates in the US – a result of the fact that there are far more men than women, excessive alcohol consumption, and because lawyers are sparsely spread over its vast territory.
Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, says he is fighting ‘calls for mass incarceration and de-police’
Clark Neily, a legal analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said Alaska also had a large Indigenous population — 19.6 percent of the state’s total, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“When you have relatively large numbers of historically disenfranchised and economically depressed people, it’s very unusual for that marginalization not to be associated with social challenges such as substance abuse and high crime rates,” Neily said.
Maine, Vermont and other northeastern states with relatively low rates of violent crime have likely benefited from “social safety nets” that helped people fight drug addiction or escape abusive partners, reducing crime incidents, Neily added.
Rafael Mangual, a scientist at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank, and author of Criminal (In)Justice, said that “comparing state crime rates is of limited use” because of the “hyper-concentration of crime.”
“In many cases, a state’s violent crime rate will be significantly determined by a small handful of neighborhood segments in the state’s largest cities,” Mangual told DailyMail.com.
Many of the states ranked poorly according to the survey — such as New Mexico, Tennessee and Arkansas — had at least one major city with a crime problem and relatively low population density, Mangual added.
The list was compiled by Texas-based firm Vela Law.