Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t officially running for president yet. But over the past few months, he has repeatedly accused Democrats of being soft on crime while misleadingly claiming that crime levels are at a 50-year low in his own state.
“If you’re engaged in mob violence in Florida, you ain’t going to be treated like they do in Portland,” DeSantis said in a February speech to a police union outside Chicago. “In Florida, if you’re doing that, you’re not getting a slap on the wrist; you’re getting the inside of a jail cell.”
His new book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, echoes that rhetoric. He calls Black Lives Matter “an ideological movement based on false premises about law enforcement.” He brags about cutting the movement to defund the police in Florida “off at the knees” by barring local governments from reallocating police funding. And he rails against progressive prosecutors for “nullify[ing] laws they don’t like based on their personal conception of ‘social justice.’”
In contrast, he touted Florida as “proud to stand for law and order” in his State of the State address in early March. “We are tough on crime, and we support the men and women of law enforcement,” he said.
But there’s a problem with DeSantis’s attacks on Democrats’ policies on crime: It’s not clear that crime is lower in Florida than in some of the cities he has criticized. In some Florida cities, the data shows murder rates are significantly higher than in blue cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Experts say there’s also no evidence to support that some of DeSantis’s signature public safety policies, including doubling down on cash bail, are effective in reducing crime, and other DeSantis crime policies involve considerable trade-offs and uncertainties.
As he preps a potential 2024 presidential run, DeSantis has also eliminated permit requirements to carry a concealed…
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