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This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 19 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
One of the “established facts” from President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign — which Republicans just blatantly helped perpetuate — was that crime was up under President Joe Biden. Trump said as much just last week. “We have a country now that’s overridden with crime,” he told NBC News’ Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.”
When crime was going up back in 2020, everyone had their theories and scapegoats.
“We have to get the criminals out of our country,” Trump continued. “We have to bring down crime. People have to be able to walk across the street and buy a loaf of bread without being shot.”
The problem with that, as we have been reporting for years on “All In,” is that it just isn’t true. Violent crime, particularly murder, saw an unprecedented spike in 2020 — when Trump was president. It continued going up under Biden for a while, but for the last two years, we have seen historic declines nationwide, according to FBI data.
More data keeps rolling in. According to the Real-Time Crime Index, crime is dropping nationwide in pretty much every major city. The biggest drops are in murder rates, which are down by more than 50% in New Orleans and Philadelphia this year, compared with two years earlier. Burglary rates also experienced a double-digit drop across many major cities.
That general trend holds across the board. When crime was going up back in 2020, everyone had their theories and scapegoats. Critics on the right blamed the George Floyd protests and the “radical Democrats” going “soft on crime” and calling to defund the police.
Others said it’s more likely driven by the once-in-a-century pandemic that completely tore up the social fabric of America and created unprecedented levels of dislocation.
We have heard virtually nothing in the mainstream media about crime rates dropping by huge amounts.
And now, almost five years later, I think we can test those hypotheses in the rearview mirror. Yes, crime has gone down in cities like San Francisco, where voters tossed out a liberal pro-reform district attorney, and in New York, where former cop Eric Adams became mayor on a platform of more cops.
But violent crime is also down in cities such as Chicago, where the mayor is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists, and in Philadelphia, where the very pro-reform, former public defense attorney turned district attorney, Larry Krasner, is probably one of the Democratic public officials Republicans hate most in the country.
Despite the coverage and the hysterics, the story looks pretty clear to me: Covid did cause a spike in crime across the country and, as the pandemic worries have receded, that crime has gone down.
Yet, as much as we heard about the spike in crime then, we have heard virtually nothing in the mainstream media about it dropping by huge amounts. That part has not permeated the public consciousness yet. Maybe the falling crime rate will get more attention in a few weeks … when Trump starts taking credit for it.
Allison Detzel contributed.