Of course he is lying — or having another hallucination, it’s hard to know which these days:
The Guardian has the story of Baltimore’s amazing drop in crime:
Violent crime in America’s big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore’s improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.
As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.
It confounds Baltimore’s bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders, and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon’s stories from The Wire or Donald Trump’s exasperating trash talk less relevant.
Mayor Brandon Scott is one of the best mayors in the nation:
The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn’t quite seven years old.
Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.
Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa) passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using Arpa money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny “defund the police” rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.
“When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,” Scott said. “Folks said that we couldn’t do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn’t do it in the first place.”
Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore’s political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington’s money.
Trust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, the state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott’s antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan’s successes.
Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence-intervention programs under the Department of Justice.
Baltimore’s approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone’s door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.
“We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,” Scott said. “They actually get a letter from me. And if they don’t do that – if they don’t take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state’s attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we’re holding people accountable.”
Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.
“Of the folks that we’ve been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,” Scott said. “You’re talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.”
Read the whole article. You’ll see that the police state tactics Trump is using were one of the reasons crime was so high in the past.
I feel sick to read something like that incoherent rant from the president. It’s not hyperbole. He’s following through on all his lunacy these days, from turning the oval office into a cheap bordello to bombing Iran and wildly manipulating the economy to deploying the military into America’s cities and wreaking revenge on his enemies. I will never say again “oh he can’t really do that.” No one with the capability of stopping him — the Republicans in congress and the Supreme Court in particular, are even trying.