Last week’s debate between Florida governor Ron DeSantis and California governor Gavin Newsom was a study in contrasts. In one corner stood a governor who defiantly resisted the lockdowns and mask mandates championed by the Trump and Biden administrations’ public-health officials. In the other: a governor who relished imposing such lockdowns and mandates but, unlike the current president, can defend those choices in complete sentences.

It’s too early to tell whether, or how much, the governors’ debate will shake up the presidential race in either party. But it certainly illustrated California’s and Florida’s radically different policies, not just on Covid, which John Tierney recently covered for City Journal, but also on crime.

“We’re near 50-year lows . . . [in] violent crimes in the state of California,” Newsom claimed during the debate. In truth, California’s violent crime rate is at a ten-year high—and rising. That’s the verdict of both the FBI’s and the Golden State’s own statistics. Meanwhile, according to both FBI and Florida statistics, the Sunshine State’s violent crime rate is down substantially from a decade ago, with the two lowest rates registered in the two most recent years with available data.

Debate moderator Sean Hannity put up a graphic during the debate showing that California’s violent crime rate in 2022 (the most recent year available) was 499.5 violent-crime offenses per 100,000 residents. Florida’s, by contrast, was 259. Hannity accurately cited the FBI’s own statistics for each state, but there’s reason to believe that those numbers aren’t wholly reliable.