Milwaukee North News

Rising national crime rates continue to disproportionately impact minority groups who account for the vast majority of crime victims, according to a Fox News report.

According to a New York Post op-ed piece by columnist Michael Goodwin, these record-high crime rates are the result of the progressive left's policies.

"The nation’s large cities are so swamped by horrific crime and violence that police, criminologists and a few honest elected Democrats are finally conceding the obvious: the progressive movement, including Black Lives Matter, that ostensibly aimed to protect minority racial groups by defunding the police and coddling criminals backfired big time," Goodwin said.

Wisconsin is no exception to this rising crime rate, with the city of Milwaukee, which is home to a large number of minority communities, experiencing a significant increase in violent crime in recent years.

The state documented at least 18,861 incidents of violent crime in 2020, which is equivalent to a rate of 323 incidents for every 100,000 people in Wisconsin, according to a Center Sware report.

This marks the fourth-lowest rate of violent crime in the Midwest and the twentieth lowest rate nationally.

However, Wisconsin does have areas where violent crime is a significant concern, most notably the Milwaukee metropolitan area, where the crime rate of 678 incidents per 100,000 individuals is much higher than the national average.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentimental, the city recorded 190 homicides in 2020, almost doubling the rate since 2019 and beating the 1991 record by 15%; in 2021, 197 murders were recorded in Milwaukee, reaching a new record.

According to Fox News, experts say this is largely due to defunding the police movements actually aimed to protect minority racial groups.

 In 2020, the FBI reported 9,941 murders of Black Americans a nearly 33% increase from the 7,484 recorded in 2019; black homicides also increased by 43%.

FBI statistics also show that 7,043 White people were murdered in 2020, whereas 9, 944 black people were murdered.

In the op-ed for the New York Post, Goodwin suggests that a spike in crime is more noticeable among nonwhite communities, and vice versa when crime decreases.

He also notes that "the people the progressives claimed to be helping actually were harmed by the anti-police, pro-criminal policies."

Milwaukee-Waukesha is the only metropolitan region in Wisconsin to rank within the top 50 most hazardous cities in the United States, according to a separate Center Square Report.

Homicides increased by 86% from 111 to 206 between 2019 and 2020, contributing to 17% of all violent crimes.

During the year 2020, most homicides in Milwaukee occurred in impoverished and largely Black neighborhoods.

The next midterm elections will likely characterize many Democratic candidates, according to a Vox article, as policies are executed statewide and locally and Democrats are deemed to be softer on crime.

The report also shows that violent crime surged in 2021, with homicides in 27 US cities jumping by 44% in 2019 and 5% in 2020.