Crime statistics keep popping up in campaign slogan.

Some warning of crime increases, others touting crime rates decreasing.

Whichever way you slice those numbers.

Governor Murphy recently announced a new effort in the state to crack down on home invasions and increase penalties for juveniles who break into a home with a firearm.

Senior political correspondent David Cruz looks at the new law and the impact it could have.

So if anybody out there is thinking about burglarizing a home, stealing a car, doing a home invasion of one form or another, you better look at the penalties before you take that step, because they are now what I would call nothing short of severe.

Phil Murphy never seems entirely at home when he's trying to talk tough on crime, and that a recent bill signing that raised the penalties for armed home invasions.

The governor tried to remind everyone who thought otherwise that he also has been pro reform.

But again, at the same time, we're incredibly proud that we brought fairness to our criminal justice system.

Today was about stronger, but the past seven years have also about a bit about fairness.

But ask any victim of crime and they'll tell you that they don't want to hear about the fairness part.

Assemblyman Paul Kanitra says these thieves broke into his house to steal the keys to his state car, and then drove off with it.

He says this bill, which makes 15 year olds eligible for adult status treatment if they're armed, still doesn't go far enough.

The bill that just got passed actually makes young thieves even more valuable now, because it increases the penalties for adults, but it does nothing for a youth with, without a gun who's committing 90% of these crimes anyway.

It should be noted that in these days leading up to election time, it's incumbent upon incumbents especially to find the spot where voters feel anxiety and then propose to ease it, even if that inner discussion of crime especially includes exploiting short term statistics and ignoring actual trends.

These policies are not based in data or evidence, so I can only you know, I can only think of them as politically motivated at this point because we know that tough on crime policies don't work.

So what we know is that in 2014, burglaries in new Jersey were over 31,000.

And for that year, last year, 13,000.

That's a huge difference.

Don't tell that to Edison, mayor of San Jose.

He calls home invasions a crisis in his community.

Although statistics show that Edison Township's crime rate is significantly lower than the national average in all categories, including burglaries.

We've increased the amount of police officers to officers to 196, which is the highest level of police officers here in Edison Township in 15 years.

We had three, sometimes even four times the amount of police officers that were on the road at a given time.

And yet that was still not enough, because when our officers were catching those bad guys and those criminals, what would end up happening is unfortunately, some of them, especially the juveniles, would get right back on the street.

The thing here, though, that concerns me the most, is the way that these policies have been targeting young people.

So in the summer, we had these really harsh penalties that were introduced for rowdy teens at the shore.

And now in this burglary bill, we see, as I mentioned, a penalty for a juvenile that would allow them to be tried as an adult and face up to a decade in prison.

Polling shows crime has been a potent issue for mostly Republicans nationally and here in Jersey, even as evidence from the FBI and others shows that crime has held steady or declined in most places across the country after steep declines over the past decade.

But anxiety voter anxiety especially knows no logic, and any politician will tell you that numbers don't lie, regardless of what they happen to be saying at the moment.

I'm David Cruz, NJ Spotlight News.