A WVIA NEWS SPECIAL REPORT
For months, Republicans have portrayed Scranton as a hotbed of out-of-control crime and blamed Democratic congressional candidate and city Mayor Paige Cognetti for it.
Combined, U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan’s campaign and a national group that helps Republican congressional candidates have sent almost 30 emails since September accusing Cognetti of presiding over a crime wave.
“For years, Mayor Cognetti has minimized rising violence, limited the ability of police to enforce the law, and ignored clear warnings about gang activity and increased homicide rates,” Bresnahan campaign manager Peter Brath said in a Dec. 10 news release.
Cognetti, challenging Bresnahan for the 8th Congressional District seat, sharply pushes back. She points to the city adding five more police officers in the midst of a spike in homicides and gang violence in 2024, spending more than $5 million to upgrade police equipment and training, and plans for a new police command center next to City Hall.
“I am a mayor and a mom. I became mayor just two weeks after having my first daughter,” she said in a recent interview. “So, my life in the last six and a half years has been 24 hours a day thinking about public safety as mayor and as somebody who's raising a family here in Scranton.”
She also pointed to crime statistics.
“The stats show that violent crime is trending down in Scranton. Those are the facts, and we will keep doing our job of investing,” Cognetti said in a recent interview.
“The stats show that violent crime is trending down in Scranton. Those are the facts, and we will keep doing our job of investing,” Cognetti said in a recent interview.
What crime statistics show
For purposes of this analysis, serious crimes include homicide/murder, aggravated assault, simple assault, rape, robbery, burglary, thefts from either a vehicle or otherwise, arson and human trafficking as defined by the state uniform crime reporting system. The system includes non-negligent manslaughter under murder and negligent manslaughter separately. Scranton has not reported any negligent manslaughter. The FBI considers murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft and motor vehicle theft and human trafficking "the nation's premier indicator of the nature of crime in the United States."
The WVIA News analysis includes simple assaults as serious crimes because the state crime reports do and because Scranton Police Chief Thomas Carroll included them in data he provided.
Based on this definition, publicly posted FBI and state crime statistics show serious crime in Scranton down 4.1% since the beginning of 2021, Cognetti’s second year in office, through 2025, the last year with complete statistics available.
Carroll defends Cognetti’s attention to crime and says the 2021-2025 period represents the most reliable indicator of where crime stands because of potential reporting errors in 2019 and 2020, the year she took office.
If either 2019 or 2020 is used as the basis for comparison, the results differ.
- If the comparison years are 2019 and 2025, the most recent year with complete data, the publicly posted statistics show serious crime dropped 39.1%.
- If the comparison years are 2020 and 2025, the publicly posted statistics show serious crime up 11.2%. That’s due at least partly to record low serious crime numbers in 2020, the year of COVID-19, when crime dropped in many places. The 1,771 recorded serious crimes in Scranton in 2020 were the fewest between 2013 and 2025.
- Comparing Cognetti’s first six years in office (2020-2025) and the six years before that (2014-2019), serious crimes dropped 36.6%.
Warning words
But Carroll cautioned against comparisons that include 2019 or 2020 because of changes in crime-reporting methodology and the city transitioning to a new federal crime reporting system for 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.
Crime in the campaign
Crime has emerged as a major issue in the campaign for the 8th Congressional District seat between Bresnahan and Cognetti. That’s mainly because the National Republican Campaign Committee, which helps the party’s congressional candidates, and the Bresnahan campaign try to portray Cognetti as indifferent to rising crime. Among the crimes they highlight:
A Dec. 9, 2025, machete attack in a downtown apartment building. A man who lived in a neighboring apartment is accused of slashing two women and a service dog to death and seriously wounding another. The NRCC dubbed the mayor "Machete Cognetti" to highlight Scranton crimes.
“This tragic double homicide is not an isolated incident, but rather a pattern of conduct by Mayor Cognetti where public safety has not been prioritized,” Brath said in a news release the day after the machete attack.
Portraying her as "Paige Cripnetti" because she posed for a picture posted on Facebook with two men who operated a hookah lounge in North Scranton and were later arrested by Scranton police as part of a ring tied to the notorious gang, the Crips.
“Got Gangs?” billboards bought by Bresnahan’s campaign ask, referring to the arrests and the photo, first publicized by Breitbart, a conservative online publication.
“Charges like that (Machete Cognetti & Paige Cripnetti) are just absurd," Cognetti said. "They are coming from a person who has made dishonesty his calling card. It's been astonishing to me that Rob's name is on those himself, that he wants to associate with those types of slanders.”
Cognetti said she had no idea who the men were when she posed for the picture.
“I am the mayor of a city of 80,000 people. I go to events every single day. I get asked to take pictures with thousands of people, and as mayor, my job is to participate in the community,” she said. “Any mayor is going to take pictures with folks, and the Bresnahan campaign seems pretty desperate in making (it) a cornerstone of some of their spending.”
Cognetti pointed out the police department she oversees arrested the two men and the machete attacker.
“It is very clear what my record on crime and public safety is. I have a very long record of that at this point,” she said. “We see the Scranton Police Department solving crimes. They have the tools to do that. We cannot prevent every crime, but Scranton PD immediately responds, solves these crimes so quickly, and we've also been putting in the work over these years to bolster the partnerships that help prevent crime and to help us solve those crimes.”
The Villa appointment
The Bresnahan campaign and the NRCC also fault Cognetti for appointing Michael Villa to the city Human Relations Commission in November 2022, even though he was charged with drunken driving in Wilkes-Barre four months earlier. The Bresnahan campaign called Villa “a known criminal” at the time of the appointment, though he had not been convicted at that point.
A month after his appointment, Villa was arrested for trespassing, fleeing police and other counts. A month after that, city police arrested him again for disorderly conduct at a downtown hotel. Four months after that, he tried to enter West Scranton High School, which caused the district to briefly lock down the school.
City police sought to commit him to a hospital for mental health reasons, and he was charged with assault after throwing a phone that hit a hospital security guard.
"Paige Cognetti put Scranton at risk by knowingly appointing a dangerous criminal to city government and then refused to answer for her decision,” NRCC spokesperson Reilly Richardson wrote in an Oct. 8 email.
Cognetti pointed out Villa worked as a grants manager for the Scranton Area Foundation and served on a city commission with only advisory power. But she acknowledged the city did not run a criminal background check that might have caught the drunken-driving charge.
“We always checked for any tax issues, any outstanding taxes,” she said. “We did not do a criminal check on those appointments, and we do now.”
She attributed Villa’s behavior to “an unfortunate mental health episode.”
“Upon that happening, we immediately made sure that we replaced him on the commission,” she said.
Republicans interpret data
Most of the emails from the NRCC or Bresnahan’s campaign attacking Cognetti’s record on crime did not cite crime statistics.
Asked to back up the allegations with crime statistics, the NRCC's Richardson referred questions to the Bresnahan campaign.
Campaign spokesperson Samantha Bullock focused on three of the nine categories of violent crime used in this analysis — homicides, rape and arson.
In 2019, the year before Cognetti took office, the campaign said, the city had no homicides, two in 2020, one in 2021 and 2022, three in 2023 and seven in 2024. WVIA confirmed the numbers in federal and state crime statistics and also found three homicides in 2025.
Between 2013 and 2018, the city had 11 homicides. From 2019 to 2024, the city had 14, which the campaign noted was a 27% increase. Both are six-year periods.
In 2019, the city reported 45 rapes, 15 in 2020, 107 in 2021, 116 in 2022, 69 in 2023 and 73 in 2024, the Bresnahan campaign said. As Carroll said, rapes were underreported before 2021, prior to the reporting classification change. WVIA News found similar numbers but more rapes — 110 in 2021 and 118 in 2022.
The Bresnahan campaign says the numbers show rapes increased 62% between 2019 and 2024. WVIA confirmed the percentage, however, the percentage draws on numbers prior to the classification change.
- In 2019, the city reported six cases of arson, 20 in 2020, 19 in 2021, 13 in 2022, 11 in 2023 and 13 in 2024. The numbers show arsons up by 116% between 2019 and 2024, the campaign said. WVIA confirmed the numbers.
The Bresnahan campaign said there was increased concern from local law enforcement “over the spike in crime in Scranton while Cognetti has been mayor.” The campaign cited the January 2024 shooting of city police Detective Kyle Gilmartin and former Lackawanna County District Attorney Mark Powell’s 2024 statement about “a rise in gang activity in Scranton and beyond in the last several years.”
In response, Cognetti campaign spokesperson Emma Mustion said the city's "brave law enforcement officers" have put their lives on the line combatting gang activity for years.
"Any tragedy related to their courageous service should never be politicized," Mustion said.
She said the department works daily with other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and officials "to combat and prevent gang violence."
"Under Mayor Cognetti’s leadership, in the wake of January 2024, the city took immediate and thorough action, including opening up the budget mid-year to add five additional officers to the police force complement," she said.
Local, state, and federal partners gathered to immediately begin planning a community violence intervention program that "will provide resources to deter gang participation."
The Cognetti campaign also pointed to the purchase of 51 new police vehicles since 2023 equipped with smart technology, WiFi, mounted laptops, and AI-driven systems to enhance officer safety and efficiency; 230 citywide cameras for better monitoring of hotspots and public events; and $4 million in police safety equipment including live feed body cameras and dash cams, and enhanced real-time surveillance technology connecting officers in the field and a command center.
After WVIA presented its findings and Carroll’s explanation about the flawed data to the Bresnahan campaign, Bullock pointed out one category of violent crime — aggravated assault — stayed roughly the same from 2021 to 2025: 169 in 2021, 165 in 2022, 142 in 2023, 114 in 2024 and 139 in 2025.
Removing 2019 and 2020 because of the potential flaws, she said, the numbers of homicides, rapes and arsons from 2021-2025 are higher compared to 2014-2018.
WVIA News tallied 214 homicides, rapes and arsons from 2014-2018 and 527 from 2021-2025. As Carroll pointed out, in the earlier five years, many rapes were classified as aggravated assaults, lowering the earlier rape numbers.
Guns, ammo and no guns
Bullock also:
- Said spending on police guns and ammunition dropped from 2020 to 2021 and more homicides followed for several years. A review of city budgets shows the budget for guns and ammunition dropped from $43,500 to $20,000 in 2021, but the 2021 budget also contained $23,629 for special operations ammunition in a separate line item that year. The overall city police budget went from $25.1 million in 2020 and $30.8 million in 2026.
Said Cognetti favored taking guns away from police. The Bresnahan campaign has cited a June 2020 Cognetti town hall.
“I would love to get to a world where, a country where we don't have, where police don't have firearms, and where we don't have firearms (and) that citizens aren't carrying them either,” Cognetti said then. “I lived in Japan for a couple years. There are no guns there, and it's lovely.”
"Paige Cognetti fantasized about disarming the police, slashed their ammunition and guns budget by half in 2021, and then gang activity surged and violent crimes continued,” Bullock said. “Even taking into account the methodology mix-up Cognetti’s administration is pushing, aggravated assaults are still just as high as they were before Cognetti took office while reported rapes have skyrocketed, reported cases of arson are consistently in the double digits, and homicides rattle the city, all showing no signs of slowing down under her failed, weak leadership."
Cognetti, who said she comes from a family of gun owners, said she “absolutely” does not want to take away guns from police.
“I lived in Japan for two years. I taught English there, and they don't have the issues of gun violence to the degree that we do in America,” she said. “If we can work on a bipartisan basis on common-sense gun laws to balance responsible gun ownership, give law enforcement what they need to take illegal guns off the streets, I think that we can get to a better place where, as a mom, I am not worried every single day about gun violence at my kid's school.”
Carroll: Cognetti backs police
Carroll agreed 2024 was a tough year because of the seven homicides and the Gilmartin shooting.
“That was a very difficult year to work through,” Carroll said. “There was a lot stacked against us, and I think that speaks of our resiliency of the agency and then the officers that work on the streets and do the investigations.”
Cognetti pointed out two of the seven homicides in 2024 were by motor vehicle. Normally, the city has one, two or three homicides, she said.
“Again, we can never prevent all of these incidents from happening, but we have solved those homicides,” she said. “We've also been putting in the work over these years to bolster the partnerships that help prevent crime and to help us solve those crimes.
Carroll said the city is in “a good spot” when it comes to crime.
“We've had our ups and downs since,” he said. “We had a spike in violent crime when our homicides climbed. That’s uncharacteristic of the area. So, with data — and this is the reason why I wanted to sit down with you — data by itself, without context, without discussion, can be twisted any way. Even after this discussion, somebody else can say 'he's a liar because look at it from this perspective.'”
As crime trends emerge, city police address them, he said.
“And I have had full support from this administration at every turn,” Carroll said. “I am the one who runs the police department, not the politicians. I advise. I'm an advisor. And the final decision-making obviously occurs with the chief executive of the city, which is the mayor. But I have not- we have not had to want (for resources to fight crime).”
