Everytown's Eye-Popping Crime Claim for Democrat Candidate Doesn't Add Up

Axios is reporting that Everytown for Gun Safety is spending $10 million to help elect at least eight Democrat congressional candidates around the country, including Pennsylvania Paige Cognetti, the current mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who once said she would "love" a world without armed police... and without armed citizens. 

Cognetti is running to unseat first-term Republican Rob Bresnahan, and as we reported yesterday, she's also getting a huge lift from Giffords, which is spending $850,000 on ads attacking her opponent. 

Everytown's ad, on the other hand, offers a positive spin on Cognetti (while still bashing Bresnahan), including an eye-popping claim that she's reduced violent crime in Scranton by a whopping 80 percent. 

Now that Everytown is claiming Cognetti reduced violent crime by 80 percent during her tenure, though, I think some more detail is warranted. 

Cognetti took office in 2020 (the same year she told a virtual town hall that she would love to live in a world where neither police nor citizens were carrying guns). According to Pennsylvania's Uniform Crime Reporting system, there were 1,199 violent crimes in Scranton in 2019, the year before she took office. The latest comparable figure is 248 in 2025. Comparing those two numbers produces a decline of 79.3 percent, which is almost certainly the basis for Everytown's claim of an 80 percent reduction.

The problem, though, is that Scranton Police Chief Thomas Carroll says comparisons that include 2019 and 2020 aren't going to be accurate because of changes in how crimes were reported, along with the city's transition to a new federal crime reporting metric in 2021. 

In 2019, the city sometimes double-reported crimes — reporting from a former crime-reporting system and a new system, Carroll said. The FBI even flagged that, he said.

In 2020, the crime-reporting methodology began to change to match a new federal system. So, in 2021, reported rapes shot up to 107 from 15 in 2020, and aggravated assaults dropped to 169 from 652 in 2020. Simple assaults rose to 648 from 101.

Before 2021, many rapes were previously categorized as aggravated assaults, the chief said.

“These are not true discrepancies, but rather they reflect a change in the reporting methodology,” Carroll said.

Because the annual crime reports were so widely distributed by the time that was discovered, the city opted against revising the figures, he said. They remain publicly available online.

The chief said the 2021 and later statistics are the most reliable basis for comparison because the city had fully converted to the new crime-reporting system by then.

Using only 2021 to 2025 for year-by-year comparisons, violent crime rose 15.5% from 2021 to 2022, dropped 14.6% in 2023, rose 1.5% in 2024 and dropped 4.2% in 2025, leading to the overall 4.1% drop from 2021 to 2025.

Scranton's reported crime rate in 2019 was inaccurate because some crimes were reported twice, but Everytown seems to be taking those figures at face value. And why wouldn't they? After all, an 80 percent drop in violent crime is far more impressive than a 4.1 percent decline. 

The problem, though, is that the available data don't support treating that 80 percent decline as real. Scranton's own police chief says the 2019 and 2020 figures aren't suitable for comparison with later years, and the folks at Everytown should know this. It took me just a few minutes of searching online to find the WVIA report with Chief Carroll's comments.

For what it's worth, the website Crime Index reports that violent crime has increased 2.1 percent between January 1 and June 30 this year compared to the same time period in 2025. If that's true, then Cognetti hasn't even reduced crime by 4.1 percent during her time in office, much less Everytown's 80 percent figure. 

Maybe Everytown has some other set of numbers that supports its claim. If so, it should produce them, because the publicly available figures that show an 80 percent decline are the same stats that Scranton's police chief says shouldn't be used for comparisons because of double-reporting and a change in methodology.

Everytown may be spending $10 million to elect its preferred candidates this fall, but apparently it couldn't spare a few minutes to check the numbers before including them in their ad supporting the anti-Second Amendment candidate in PA-08. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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