In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden boasted that violent crime is at a 50-years low. But the perception of crime is clashing with the statistics.
"I don't believe it, plain and simple. I don't believe it because we're experiencing different results," Auriol Sonia Morris -- a South Carolina education, finance and legal consultant who describes herself as a Black conservative Republican and a supporter of former President Donald Trump -- told ABC News.
While Blacks account for 14% of the U.S. population, they comprise 60% of those killed by firearm homicides annually, according to an analysis published in February by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2017 to 2021, showed Black males 18- to 24-years-old are 23 times more likely to die by firearm homicide than their white male peers.
Howard Lavine, a professor of political psychology at the University of Minnesota, said the perception of crime is skewed by a focus on year-over-year statistics and not by a historical perspective. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland highlighted the FBI's report in separate statements, crediting the Department of Justice's violent crime reduction strategy launched in 2021 and the White House's American Rescue Plan, which committed $15 billion to preventing crime and reducing violence.
"The optics outweigh the analytics right now," Robert Boyce, the retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said of the clashing perspectives on crime.
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