> Cities with a majority progressive government, when taken as a whole, have significantly more crime than non-progressive.
The article you link to does not argue or support this position, at all. Was this the wrong link?
I'll pull out what I've gotten from it. It's called "The Liberals Who Won’t Acknowledge the Crime Problem", and the author tries to argue that various liberals (which he conflates with progressives) are ignoring a crime problem. The author starts out by framing the piece against various crimes that occurred in various cities. And then says this:
Anecdata, of course, are not the same as data. And in cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, progressive district attorneys have insisted that their critics have gotten the facts wrong. As The New York Times recently reported, the now-recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin routinely “confront[ed] voters with data that shows overall crime has not increased meaningfully while he has been in office.” Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s cantankerous district attorney, has developed a habit of browbeating critics in town-hall meetings with appeals to “the science.” His in-house criminologist, Krasner has insisted, can give people the real numbers if they really want them. Ordinary residents are being told that what they perceive to be true is not, in fact, true.
The problem here is that humans understand and interact with the world based on perception and feeling. Politics is about policy, but it is also about human nature—which, however one wishes to characterize it, is a constant to contend with. You can try to transcend human nature by appealing to people’s better angels or through education and enlightenment—but only up to a point.
Okay, so there we have it. What does the word "acknowledge" mean in the title? It means they're not giving into the right wing narrative and instead are sticking by data, facts, and statistics. The author actually writes in so many words "feelings are more important than facts".
Of course the author tries to claim that the stats can be cherry picked, but they just step in it. They cite a NY Times article which tells:
There is no compelling evidence that Mr. Boudin’s policies have made crime significantly worse in San Francisco. Overall crime in San Francisco has changed little since Mr. Boudin took office in early 2020.
And the author quibbles that a YOY increase of burglaries from 7,217 to 7,575 qualifies as a crime wave. In trying to prove their point, the author got this extra information from the NYT which further serves to diminish their point, but they had to print it anyway as a professional matter:
“the pandemic and other broad societal factors seem to have influenced the patterns of property crime, rather than any causal link to policies within the purview of a district attorney.”
The author doesn't even attempt to rebut that. Yet, they don't skip a beat before continuing to call out liberals. The author tries to call liberals out for "motivated reasoning", but that seems actually to be what the author is doing: trying to find anything to support their position, facts and statistics be damned.