In 2023, New York City recorded just 4.1 homicides per 100,000 people — lower than Republican-led Jacksonville, Florida, at 11.94. Yet political ads would have you believe party labels tell the whole crime story. They don't.
Every election season, we're told the same narrative: if your city feels dangerous, blame the mayor. Republicans say Democratic mayors are "soft on crime." Democrats point at Republican leaders and say their policies make cities more violent. It's a clean, satisfying story — and it's wrong.
This pattern holds across cities regardless of size or political leadership. Whether you look at heavily Democratic cities or Republican-led ones of similar size, crime trends tend to follow broader regional and national patterns rather than electoral cycles.
The Most Comprehensive Study Yet
A landmark study published in Science Advances in January 2025 by researchers at Harvard Kennedy School and George Washington University analyzed 3,254 individual elections between 1990 and 2021 in 398 cities — covering 99% of all U.S. cities over 75,000 population that elect mayors. [Reference: "The partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests," Science Advances, January 2025]
They used rigorous statistical methods — three separate analytical approaches including regression discontinuity (comparing cities where elections were extremely close) and two robust difference-in-differences methods — with 89% of cities having close elections included in the analysis.
Why this methodology matters: Close elections are crucial because they act like a natural experiment. When a Democrat beats a Republican by just a few votes, the winning city is essentially identical to the losing city in every way except the mayor's party. This eliminates the usual problem where Democratic cities might differ from Republican ones in ways that affect crime regardless of leadership. The researchers also tracked the same cities over time as they switched from Republican to Democratic mayors (or vice versa), providing a second way to isolate the effect of partisanship.
Post hoc power analyses confirmed their null findings weren't due to weak statistical methods; they had 87% probability of detecting meaningful effects if they existed.
The Findings
The conclusion is stark: across hundreds of cities and three decades, there is no impact of a mayor's partisan affiliation on crime and arrest rates. Whether your mayor is a Democrat or a Republican has no measurable effect on homicides, robberies, property crimes, police staffing, arrest patterns, or public safety budgets. Even the largest estimated effects were roughly equivalent to just 2.5% of the average outcome.
The researchers did find one subtle but real difference: under Democratic mayors, the Black share of arrests for minor offenses dropped modestly, particularly for drug crimes and other non-violent offenses, likely reflecting shifts in policing priorities. But when it comes to the big, scary headlines — murder rates, violent crime spikes, public safety crises — there's simply no partisan fingerprint.
Why This Makes Sense
Crime isn't driven by the letter after a mayor's name. It's driven by a complex mix of poverty, guns, housing costs, demographics, and police tactics. The data proves what should be obvious: some of the safest large cities have Democratic mayors, while some Republican-led cities struggle with higher crime rates than the national average — exactly the opposite of what partisan narratives predict.
What this research teaches us is that partisan blame is a distraction. What the evidence suggests actually reduces crime: consistent police presence in high-crime areas, swift prosecution of violent offenses, investment in youth programs, and addressing root causes like housing instability and drug treatment. Real safety depends on policy choices and execution, not party branding.
Beyond the Blame Game
This is inconvenient for cable news and Twitter warriors because it removes the easy villain. Local media shares responsibility here — covering crime spikes without context or treating every incident as evidence of broader political failure feeds the very cycle this research debunks.
If we want safer cities, we need to stop shouting about "Democrat crime waves" or "Republican neglect" and start asking harder, more local questions: Are we funding what works? Are we enforcing laws fairly? Are we tracking results transparently?
So the next time a candidate promises to solve your city's crime problem through party loyalty, ask them instead: What's your specific plan for our local challenges? What metrics will you track? How will we know if it's working?
Politics loves a simple story. Reality rarely cooperates.