Biden Ended the Trump Crime Wave

Schedules being what they are, this column was written before the first Biden-Trump debate. So if you’re looking for savvy takes on the effectiveness of various strategies and tactics, you’re in the wrong place.

It seems safe to predict, however, that Donald Trump — a felon who has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation — will try to make a good bit of the debate about crime. It also seems safe to predict that almost everything he says about crime (and other subjects, like the economy) will be deeply misleading, if not outright lies, despite the prospect of real-time and post hoc fact-checking.

After all, Trump and his allies have spent months falsely portraying America as a nation terrorized by a wave of violent crime, pointing the finger at migrants and claiming that President Biden is responsible.

Here’s what actually happened: We experienced a substantial rise in homicides in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump was in the White House. After Biden took his place, the homicide rate first plateaued, then began a steep decline that seems to be continuing. Murders, in particular, dropped rapidly in 2023 and seem to have plunged further this year. It seems quite likely that the homicide rate in 2024 will turn out to be lower than it was in any year of the Trump presidency.

Or to put it another way, if you want to play this by MAGA rules, under which the president is held responsible for national crime rates on his watch, then you’d have to say that Biden ended the Trump crime wave.

Prominent Trump supporters are, of course, insisting that the good news on crime is fake. But while there is some room for debate in defining what constitutes a violent crime, a murder is a murder, which is why I focus on homicide numbers. And national crime data is assembled from reports by many police departments; are they all involved in a deep-state conspiracy?

The truth is that the recent history of crime in America is a highly encouraging story. The social disruption caused by the pandemic caused a temporary jump in violent crime, but our society quickly regained its equilibrium, and our cities are probably as safe as they have ever been.

Still, you may say, never mind facts, which have a well-known liberal bias. What about feelings? Aren’t Americans living in constant fear of crime?

No, they aren’t. People may tell pollsters that they believe crime is getting worse; they almost always do (crime plunged between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, yet a majority of Americans consistently said it was rising). But if you look at how people behave, they act as if they’re feeling pretty safe these days.

To see what I mean, consider an example of someone well known who claims to be feeling terrified. The other day, in a segment about border security, Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News host, declared, “I don’t walk anywhere anymore in New York City.” Maybe that’s really how she feels, in which case I feel sorry for her and all the experiences she’s missing. Contrary to what many people apparently believe, New York is not, in fact, an urban hellscape; I walk around the city all the time — including in neighborhoods that are home to large immigrant communities — and it’s a fairly cheerful place these days, whose sidewalks are full of other people doing the same.

But don’t take my word for it. Cell phone data lets researchers track foot traffic in urban downtowns. As of last year, weekday traffic was still well below prepandemic levels, presumably reflecting fewer people commuting into downtown offices given the rise in remote and hybrid work. But weekend foot traffic, driven by people choosing to take advantage of urban amenities, had almost fully recovered — which wouldn’t be happening if shoppers, tourists and so on were terrified of crime. In fact, around this time last year, weekend foot traffic in Midtown Manhattan, where Fox News has its headquarters, was higher than it was before the pandemic.

Trump might not concoct his own crime stats, but my guess is that in this campaign, he’ll never concede that violent crime has come way down, and he’ll continue to focus on a few widely publicized stories, examples of terrible crimes committed by migrants.

Responding to such stories is delicate; nobody wants to minimize the horror of even one violent crime, whoever commits it. But if we’re going to smear whole groups of people for crimes committed by a few members of those groups, where do we stop? For what it’s worth, a new study by the right-leaning Cato Institute finds that in Texas, undocumented immigrants are less likely to be convicted of murder than the native-born. (It’s even less likely for legal immigrants.)

The important thing to remember is that the decline in the violent crime rate is in fact a huge Biden-era success story. And the president probably deserves some credit for that success — among other things, the American Rescue Plan included a lot of aid to state and local governments, which may have encouraged additional spending on law enforcement. But no matter how you cut it, crime should be considered one of Biden’s strengths, not a weak point.

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