Take Your 'Border Crime Wave' Bullsh*t Back To Breitbart And Stuff It, Says Texas Lawman

Just as long as Anton Chigurh doesn't show up again.

As Republicans keep ramping up their racist dog-whistly election-year lies that America is a dangerous cesspool of constant crime (yes, there's been an increase in violent crime in the last couple years, but crime rates overall are still far below those of the 1990s), we've at last seen some pushback from Democrats and journalists who call that baloney what it is. For instance, there's Joy Hofmeister, the Democratic nominee for governor in Oklahoma, who pointed out that in deep-red Oklahoma, where even city governments are dominated by Republicans, the murder rate is far higher than in California and New York. 

And for all the rightwing talk of he US-Mexico border being a Mad Max hellscape where asylum seekers are purportedly terrorizing the populace by simply existing, The Daily Beast reports that Police Chief Victor Rodriguez of McAllen, Texas, finds himself frequently having to explain to rightwing politicians visiting his city just 11 miles from the border that no, it's not the Wild West there.

No, not even with that terrifying butterfly refuge that QAnon people keep freaking out about. In fact, Rodriguez points out, McAllen is currently enjoying its 12th straight year of reduced crime rates, and the city has the lowest overall crime levels since 1985, he says, adding that "the only reason it’s only 37 years is that’s what's on the books."

Read More:

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Rodriguez says he often has to set visiting political figures straight when they come to the border for a photo op, because "The reality and how the world is seeing us are two different things." But then, we suppose, they go and ride the Department of Public Safety patrol boat on the Rio Grande and feel very tough pointing its machine guns at the Mexican side of the river. Then they waste the whole experience by not making even one Apocalypse Now joke. The horror, the horror, I loved you in Wall Street . 

Ahem.

The Daily Beast story points out that McAllen's violent crime rate, as of right now, is "180.2 per 100,000 people, less than a tenth that of the cities with the nation’s highest rate, St. Louis (2,082), Detroit (2,057), and Baltimore (2,027)." While we were at it, we looked up the FBI's statistics for Texas as a whole, which is a lot higher than McAllen, too, at 446 per 100,000 people. Probably "only in Democrat cities," right?

Now, the story does note, citing Axios, that other cities on the US-Mexico border have higher crime rates than McAllen, but that even their crime rates are still relatively low compared to bigger cities elsewhere in the country. We'll go straight to the Axios write-up, because we needed some bullet points today.

• El Paso, Texas, a city of 681,000, had a violent crime rate of 318 per 100,000 residents. Memphis, a city of 650,00, has a violent crime rate of 2,356.5 — more than seven times higher.

• Del Rio, Texas — a city of nearly 36,000 people, where mounted Border Patrol agents on horseback were seen charging Haitian migrants last month — had a violent crime rate of 162.4. Lima, Ohio, a city nearly the same size in population, had a violent crime rate of 688.8.

• Calexico, California; Nogales, Arizona; and the Texas cities of Del Rio, Eagle Pass, and McAllen all had violent crime rates below 190.

On the whole, the Daily Beast notes, McAllen's crime rate is about half the national average. Rodriguez is pretty pleased that he's been able to keep crime down in the city of 145,000, and that he has enough officers available to send out when they're needed — about two cops per thousand residents. He's been able to set up some dedicated investigatory units, like a group of investigators who went after car thefts, bringing the auto theft rate from more than 2,000 cars stolen annually in the 1990s to only around 50 a year now.

All in all, McAllen sounds like it's doing pretty well with its policing, although we're sure some of the more panicky rightwing types would argue that the only reason McAllen is peaceful is because all those dangerous undocumented people are turning themselves in to the Border Patrol, then requesting asylum and terrorizing the populace by existing while they wait for a hearing. Just a reminder that — as immigrant advocates have been pointing out since Trump lied about migrants — immigrants (both documented and undocumented) are STILL less likely to commit crimes than born-right-here Americans, including 100 percent of presidents who were in office from 2017 to 2021.

[ Daily Beast / Axios / Cato Institute / Photo:  City of McAllen on Facebook]

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