Gov. Kathy Hochul is now openly spreading absurd conspiracy theories about crime, claiming Republican “master manipulators” and “data deniers” want you to falsely think red states are safer than blue ones like New York. Of course, she’s the real data-denier
“Master manipulators,” she said Sunday, “have this conspiracy going” to “convince people in Democratic states that they’re not as safe.” But “the safer places are the Democratic states.”
Her plunge in the polls has her resorting to bald-faced lies: She knows Democratic cities — Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans and, yes, New York — drive up state murder rates, as crime expert Raphael Mangual documented in The Post. (With hard data.)
For example, New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport, all run by Democratic mayors, had a collective murder rate in 2019 of 28.1 per 100,000, more than three times the 8.3-per-100,000 rate in the rest of Louisiana. That drove up the statewide count by 41%, to 11.7 per 100,000.
Among the 50 largest US cities, homicide rates were 68% higher in blue vs. red ones. Similarly, per the Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen and Christos Makridis: “Counties with a higher share of GOP voters not only have lower homicide rates but also a lower growth in homicide rates between 2019 and 2020.”
Hochul is desperate to have New Yorkers think the crime surge is all in their head. She even asked her rival for governor, Rep. Lee Zeldin, why locking up criminals is “so important” to him.
Never mind that citywide murders last year were 67% higher than in 2017, and that, though they’ve fallen slightly this year, other crimes continue to soar: As of Sunday, rapes in Gotham were up 10.9% over last year, robberies 32.4%, grand larcenies 38.5% and car thefts 34.5%.
The gov has totally caved to her party’s radicals, who refuse to admit that their policies (mandatory no-bail releases, defunding the police, easier parole) have set crime ablaze. They cling to cherry-picked stats supposedly proving that their catastrophic bail reform is irrelevant to the carnage, yet numerous critics — from Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to left-leaning Albany District Attorney David Soares to ex-Queens prosecutor Jim Quinn (not to mention us) — have all cited comprehensive data thoroughly debunking that claim.
Are progressive black Democrats such as Adams and Soares part of the “conspiracy”? What would Christina Yuna Lee — killed in February by a man who’d been released on cashless bail — think? Or Keaira Bennefield, allegedly shot to death by her husband in Hochul’s hometown of Buffalo after he was set free on no bail?
No, Republicans aren’t the ones denying data; it’s Hochul & Co. And if she ekes out a victory Nov. 8, New Yorkers can only expect the violence to continue while Hochul keeps lecturing them to believe her cherry-picked data and not their own lying eyes.
