As protesters in Los Angeles denounced United States President Donald Trump’s deportation policies, sometimes leading to clashes with law enforcement, Republican and Democratic politicians sparred over who has the bigger crime problem: blue states or red states.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, took to X to challenge three elected Republican officials who had offered posts critical of California and Newsom’s handling of the recent protests.
- On June 9, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said Los Angeles “looks like a third world country – anarchists are in charge, law enforcement is being attacked, and the rule of law is nonexistent”. Later that day, Newsom posted: “Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California. Its murder rate is ranked third in the entire country.”
- On June 10, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma posted: “America is sick of illegal immigration and weak, lawless liberal leadership.” He called it “rich” that Newsom was suing Trump to reverse the president’s federalisation of California’s National Guard. Later that day, Newsom posted: “If you want to discuss violence, let’s start with your state’s murder rate – which is 40 percent higher than California’s.”
- Also on June 10, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted: “What’s happening in California would never happen here in Arkansas because we value order over chaos.” The next day, Newsom responded, “Your homicide rate is literally DOUBLE California’s.”
Newsom’s comparisons are close to accurate because he worded his assertions carefully to refer to the homicide rate. California has more homicides than any state, but it also has by far the largest population, and using the rate – which refers to homicides per 100,000 people – makes it possible to compare states on an even footing.
Some Newsom critics replied to his post by arguing that the numbers the governor used are unreliable because California has some of the lowest rates of reporting crimes to the FBI’s data collectors.
But this argument is a red herring: Newsom’s political office confirmed to PolitiFact that his data are from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That means his statistics are not subject to concerns about low reporting rates (a problem that commentators have exaggerated).
California fares less well against these three states when measuring overall violent crime, which includes homicides, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies.
What does the CDC data show?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes data showing the number of homicides per state as well as the rate of homicides per 100,000 people. The latter metric allows a comparison of bigger states to smaller states.
According to 2022 data, the latest available, Alabama ranks third in the nation for its homicide rate with 14.9 per 100,000 people. (It trails Mississippi and Louisiana and also the District of Columbia, which generally isn’t considered comparable to the 50 states because it is essentially a city rather than a state.)
Arkansas ranks sixth with a rate of 11.8 homicides per 100,000 people. Oklahoma ranks 20th with a rate of 8.3 per 100,000.
And California? It ranks 30th with a rate of 5.9 per 100,000.
Alabama’s rate is about 2.5 times higher than California’s rate; Newsom said it was triple. Oklahoma’s rate is 41 percent higher than California’s; Newsom said it was 40 percent higher. And Arkansas’s rate is double California’s, which is what Newsom said.
California’s homicide rate is lower than Alabama’s, Arkansas’s and Oklahoma’s
“The CDC data are very reliable when it comes to death and mortality data because these come directly from coroners’ records and state health departments,” said Alex R Piquero, a University of Miami criminologist and former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. “They are among the most respected of all health data collections.”
Although the CDC’s data are from 2022, the 2023 FBI data show the same general ranking pattern. The FBI collects data from law enforcement agencies rather than coroners’ offices.
In its statistics, Alabama ranked third among the 50 states with 10.3 homicides per 100,000 people. Arkansas ranked fifth with 9.4 per 100,000, and Oklahoma ranked 16th with 6.1 per 100,000. California ranked 25th with 5 per 100,000.
“There is a lot of research on the variation of homicides across states in the United States, and both the CDC and FBI show” that Newsom is generally accurate, Piquero said.
One technical note: In his posts, Newsom flipped back and forth between referring to the “homicide” rate and the “murder” rate. For the CDC data, he should have exclusively used the term “homicide” because the CDC doesn’t use the term “murder”.
What about violent crime overall?
The data on violent crime are less favourable for California.
The data the FBI collected for 2023 show that Arkansas’s violent crime rate ranked fourth among the states, about 620 incidents per 100,000 people. California ranked sixth with 508 per 100,000 people. That was higher than either Oklahoma (15th with 414 per 100,000) and Alabama (19th with 404 per 100,000).
Our ruling
Newsom said California has lower homicide rates than Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Data for 2022 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which criminologists consider a reliable source, show that California has a lower homicide rate than Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma and roughly in the proportions that Newsom said.
Data from 2023 collected by the FBI generally mirror the CDC data.
Looking at violent crime more broadly – a category that includes rape, aggravated assault and robbery in addition to homicide – California fares less well, notching rates higher than either Oklahoma and Alabama.
