When Democratic strategist and Fox News Host Jessica Tarlov asked recently why President Donald Trump doesn’t spend as much crime-fighting time and resources on red cities with huge crime problems like my former hometown of Oklahoma City as much as blue cities such as Washington, D.C., my ears immediately perked up.

Having grown up in “Okie City” and having returned there many times to visit family and friends since moving to the nation’s capital in 1976, Tarlov’s immediate comparison seemed way off base. And indeed it turns out that, using the most current available data for per-capita homicides — that is, how many murders for every 100,000 people in a city — Okie City isn’t even in the top 20 (see chart).

There were 78 homicides there in 2024, so with a population of 674,000, the per-capita homicide rate is 11.57. That compares with the 17 per-capita homicide rate for Washington, D.C., as calculated by Michael Lloyd’s Freedom for All Americans, a liberal activist nonprofit. Frankly, I expected the gap between the two cities to be much wider, but, unlike in my childhood years, Oklahoma City has been a frequent interim destination for transient illegal immigrants for more than a decade.

It’s important to remember when dealing with crime data that calculations can vary depending upon how factors are used. For example, a city of 500,000 residents with 50 homicides in 2024 will show a per-capita homicide rate of 10.00. But if the same city’s suburbs in different counties are included in the calculation, the numbers change. With a population of 650,000 and 71 homicides, the “same” city’s rate becomes 10.92. I use the Freedom for All Americans figures because the calculations are correct, given the factors used.

It should also be kept in mind that homicide is not the only “violent crime” that can terrorize neighborhoods. There are rapes, armed robberies, assault with intent to kill, carjacking with a gun, etc. City A may have a much higher per-capita rate for rape than City B does for homicide, so the culture of crime can vary from one place to another.

It should be noted that Tarlov prefaced her comments about Trump’s alleged ignoring of red cities with crime problems comparable to those of blue cities by acknowledging that most Washingtonians agree the capital city does indeed have a serious crime problem.

“I say crime is a problem in D.C., at least to some degree. Fifty-one percent of voters who live there think it’s extremely serious or very serious problem. You saw that in the reaction of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who said maybe it will be a good thing to have an increased police presence. That doesn’t mean that this is the way they should have gone about it …” Tarlov said.

Then she continued, asking, “What if Donald Trump started trying to take over Republican-run cities and they exist. Go to Oklahoma City, right, and talk to them about the violence there. He never talks about that, [never] says anything about that. He doesn’t talk about murder rampages in red states. He’s only targeting blue states.”

Interestingly enough, it may well be that Trump doesn’t focus on red cities because so few of them rank among the worst crime-ridden American metropolises. Mention the crime problem and the biggest cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, immediately come to mind. But the top 20 compiled by Freedom for All Americans projects a somewhat different picture.

St. Louis is the nation’s “murder capital” with a per-capita rate of 69.4 murders per 100,000 population, or nearly seven times higher than Oklahoma City. Second is Baltimore with 51.1, followed by New Orleans at 40.6, Detroit at 39.7 and Cleveland at 33.7.

The next five include Las Vegas (31.4), Kansas City (31.2), Memphis (27.1), Newark (25.6) and Chicago (24), the first of the biggest three cities in the Top 20. Philadelphia (20.2) is 12th on the list and Atlanta (16.7) is 20th. Tulsa (18.6), the only red city in the top 20, is 19th. Neither New York nor Los Angeles are in the top 20. 

Viewed from the perspective of the 2024 presidential election results, the only top 20 city carried by Trump was Tulsa, which he won with 56.5% of the votes, compared to 41.3% for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Ranked according to the Harris percentage of votes in 2024 emphasizes just how deeply blue the cities are with the highest per-capita homicide rates. Harris received 90.2% of the vote in Washington, D.C., compared to a mere 6.7% for Trump. Harris’s second and third highest percentages of the vote came in Baltimore with 84.5% and New Orleans with 82.1%.

The Harris average for all of the top 20 cities was 77.4% in 2024 versus Trump’s 30.3%.

The Washington Stand asked Tarlov for comment on this news story, but none was received as of Wednesday afternoon.