Dem
47
GOP
53
Republicans are once again latching onto blaming crime on Democrats as their campaign theme. In this case, it is an ad by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) against Roy Cooper in North Carolina, although last we checked Cotton was not running against Cooper himself. He is running for reelection in Arkansas, but probably figures that since he is a shoo-in, why not campaign against some Democrat in another state?
His ad claims Cooper is "soft on crime," that old standby. The "evidence" is that on Aug. 22, 2025—when Cooper had been out of the governor's mansion for 7 months—a Black man named Decarlos Brown who has been diagnosed as having schizophrenia pulled out a knife on a light rail train in Charlotte and suddenly stabbed a YOUNG BLONDE WOMAN to death for no reason. Maybe he suspected that she was an immigrant (which she was, from Ukraine) and was just helping Trump rid the country of immigrants. Who knows? In any case, it was Cooper's fault because Brown should have been locked up. Actually, he was, for another crime, but after he served his sentence, he was released. He should have been in a mental hospital, but after the state legislature cut funding for mental hospitals, there is a shortage of beds there.
There are over 20,000 homicides per year in the U.S. But this one was tailor-made for a negative ad: Crazy Black man kills a pretty young white woman for no reason other than that he is crazy. What the ad somehow misses is that violent crime has been dropping for decades, as shown in this graph of reported violent crime incidents per 100,000 people since 1990:
Is crime at zero? No, but although Republicans decry crime—especially violent crime committed by scary Black
men named Willie Horton against pretty young white women—they don't actually propose anything that might
actually reduce it, like more funding for mental hospitals. Plan B is to have the National Guard pick up litter in D.C.
Of course, this just treats the symptoms. What would work better is shooting the litterbugs on sight. (V)