New Jersey leads the nation in criminals per politician,
an analysis by The Washington Post shows.
The analysis, political writer Philip Bump writes — which seems to reinforce the stereotype of New Jersey politics and corruption — was prompted by the indictment Wednesday of
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez on charges of accepting illegal gratuities. He's declared his innocence.
"It's worth questioning the extent to which the stereotype is valid," Bump writes.
Bump reports he pulled data on the number of elected officials in 2012, and every state's crime rate from 2013, and compared those numbers to a list of people indicted or convicted of crimes at the federal, state and local level since 2000.
Then the number of criminal politicians per 1,000 in the state at the federal, state and local levels was plotted versus the rate of violent crime in the state per 100,000 residents.
Bump said the graf showed that compared to the national averages, New Jersey's politicians are more prone to crime and the citizenry less so — on a relative par with Rhode Island.
Alaska, meanwhile, has a crime rate far above average for both politicians and citizens, while New Mexico has a lot more crime from its citizenry than from its politicians. Vermont doesn't have much of either.
"None of this explains why," Bump notes. "Crime in politics, like crime in the rest of the world, doesn't always follow clear patterns. But it does have some favorite places to stop."
"For nearly three years, I've lived under a Justice Department cloud. And today I'm outraged that this cloud has not been lifted,"
Menendez declared after the indictment was announced.
"But I will not be silenced. I'm confident at the end of the day, I will be vindicated and they will be exposed."
"I'm not going anywhere," he promised.
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