Gov. Bill Lee, who sits upon a pile of 27,717 corpses, has decided that a winning reelection strategy is to slag off Nashville. In an Oct. 11 tweet Lee wrote: “As cities across the country face surging crime politicians in Nashville have chosen to defund local police to fuel an extreme political agenda. This is an affront to Tennessee families & taxpayers.” He included a link to this WKRN piece, which references Metro's plan to pull $500,000 from various departments and send it to Planned Parenthood.
When people are talking about defunding the police, they are talking about defunding the police. Not “we need this money elsewhere,” but “you terrorize people so we’re not giving you any money.” Nashville is just farting around with a relatively small amount of money in its budget, not making some extreme political statement. Which Lee knows, because when conservatives were all “defund Planned Parenthood,” Lee & Co. knew they meant “stop giving Planned Parenthood money” — not “oh, let’s think about our budget.”
Also, if Gov. Lee is so affronted by how Nashville carries out its business, he doesn’t have to work here. He could just quit his job and go be King of the Needlessly Dead somewhere else in Tennessee.
But my favorite part is how weaselly this tweet is. Look how he frames this. “As cities across the country face surging crime,” Nashville might send a tiny portion of the police department’s quarter-billion-dollar budget elsewhere. What do cities across the country have to do with Nashville? If crime in Boston is out of control, why would the Metro Nashville Police Department need more money? Are we going to send our police to Boston to arrest their criminals?
The real question is whether there’s surging crime here in Nashville. As the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics, but we’re going to look at some statistics. I’m going to walk you through how I got those statistics so you can put the faith you deem appropriate in them. According to U.S. News and World Report, Nashville has a violent crime rate of 606.6 crimes per 100,000 people. (This will be surprising to the MNPD, but I think what’s happening is that they’re using the population of “Nashville” — meaning everything the Census Bureau lumps into being the Nashville area, which gives you a population of around 1.5 million people, with MNPD’s crime statistics.) And also according to them, that’s a higher-than-average crime rate. And whew, that does sound alarming.
I went to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer to try to get a better understanding of what this all means. I used the information the FBI gets from MNPD and searched for the numbers for the past 10 years. Here is the number of reported violent crimes per year:
- 2011: 7,253
- 2012: 7,314
- 2013: 6,667
- 2014: 7,289
- 2015: 7,337
- 2016: 7,401
- 2017: 7,731
- 2018: 7,704
- 2019: 7,437
- 2020: 7,951
- 2021: 8,057
I don’t know about you, but I was surprised that in a city as large as Nashville we’re still looking at less than 10,000 violent crimes per year. To put this another way, in 2021 there were 8,057 violent crimes. There are 365 days in a year. That’s about 22 violent crimes a day. We have eight police precincts. That means there are three violent crimes per day for each precinct. One for each eight-hour shift. Now obviously crimes don’t spread themselves out evenly throughout the city or evenly throughout the day, but I still think it’s valuable to understand what this frequency actually means.
And if you look at MNPD’s own numbers, crime in Nashville overall is trending down. We’ve seen some minor upward fluctuations in the past couple of years, but during the “spike” in violent crime in 2021, it was still safer in Nashville than it had been in any year from 1990 to 2008. And the overall crime in the city has decreased, even with a slight bump over the past couple of years. The highest amount of recent “overall” crime was in 2020, with 5,475.8 crimes per 100,000 people. Before 2011, we never had so few crimes, unless you go all the way back to 1966.
Whew, I tell you what, this “radical agenda” of enjoying decreasing crime rates is just not the terrible thing Bill Lee is making it out to be.
But still, if evil “radical” Nashville is seeing decreasing crime rates, then what about the good guys? How’s the state Gov. Lee is in charge of doing? The crime rate must be through the floor, right? Those Republican policies must just be making it a virtual paradise of safety out in the more conservative part of the state, right?
Don’t worry, Bill. I made you a chart using the FBI’s numbers so you can just luxuriate in what a great job you’re doing keeping Tennesseans safe:
Oh. Hmm. That does not look like the crime-rate chart of a man who has any business feeling affronted by Nashville. Nashville, though — we surely have been affronted by him.
