Los Angeles and San Francisco have been catastrophic,” DeSantis said.
[Andrew Warren: DeSantis sacked me for doing my job as a prosecutor. Who’s next?]
But the data tells another story. By my calculation, the homicide rate in San Francisco in 2020 (the last year for which comparable data are available) was 5.5 per 100,000 people. The rate for the state of Florida that year was 7.8, according to the CDC, a remarkable comparison given that crime in cities tends to be higher than crime in states as a whole. The 2020 homicide rate in Los Angeles was, by my calculation, higher at 8.9 per 100,000 people, but that’s still significantly lower than the murder rates in nearly every large locality in Florida, including Miami-Dade County (10.7) and Jacksonville (15.5), and the capital, Tallahassee (14.5).
Journalist Radley Balko
Washington Post