Trump and the Republicans are flogging violent crime as their biggest issue after immigration. And they’ve actually conflated the two with a nonsensical new slogan called “Biden Migrant Crime.”
Not that it matters to the cult because they live in an alternate universe, but reality should be biting for anyone who isn’t indoctrinated in Trump fantasy. The Wall St. Journal reports:
Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump.
Nationwide, homicides dropped around 20% in 133 cities from the beginning of the year through the end of March compared with the same period in 2023, according to crime-data analyst Jeff Asher, who tabulated statistics from police departments across the country.
Philadelphia saw a 35% drop in killings as of April 12 compared with the same period last year, police data show. In New York City, homicides fell 15% through April 7. Homicides in Columbus, Ohio, plunged 58% through April 7.
Here’s just a random sample:
The declines so far in 2024, on top of last year’s drop, mirror the steep declines in homicides of the late 1990s.
“There’s just a ton of places that you can point to that are showing widespread, very positive trends,” said Asher, co-founder of criminal justice consulting firm AH Datalytics. “Nationally, you’re seeing a very similar situation to what you saw in the mid-to-late ’90s. But it’s potentially even larger in terms of the percentages and numbers of the drops.”
During the pandemic, homicide rates shot up around the country, sparking concerns that the progress made during a decadeslong drop in violent crimes had been undone. The number of homicides in the U.S. rose nearly 30% in 2020 from the prior year to 21,570, the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Researchers and authorities attributed the upward spike to several factors, including crime-prevention programs, courts and prisons being unable to operate normally when Covid was spreading; young people not in school due to shutdowns; and law enforcement pulling back after social unrest following the high-profile police killings of George Floyd and other Black people.
“The police went to sleep,” said Dean Dabney, a criminology professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “The prosecution and the courts went to sleep, and the jails and prisons let people out. So you had an ideal situation for criminals.”
Who was president when that happened? I keep forgetting.
The truth is that any president probably would have faced a similar situation but Trump pimping crime as a Biden failure is really rich considering the facts. And saying it while the stats are coming down is just plain old gaslighting.
If you have a WSJ sub you can plug your city or town into the interactive data base to find your own statistics. It’s pretty astonishing.