Trump takes credit for political shift reducing violent crime to record lows

President Trump is taking credit for the lowest homicide rate ever recorded in America, and some criminologists say his tough-on-crime talk may be a reason violent crime has dropped by double digits.

Mr. Trump met Thursday with members of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, to declare that his policies were responsible for the crime drop.

He said increased deportations of illegal immigrants, restoring the federal death penalty and boosting federal funding for police have restored law and order in America.

“I don’t think anybody has been more for the police than I am. In recent years, far-left radicals have vilified and targeted our nation’s police, with Marxist prosecutors and soft-on-crime politicians making it impossible for you to do your jobs and do them the way you want. Under the Trump administration, those days are over,” Mr. Trump told the FOP members at the White House.

After years of spiking crime rates starting with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, crime numbers have reversed across nearly all categories in the past year and a half.

Homicide rates are down 21.5% through April from the first four months of last year, according to data from the Real Time Crime Index. Rapes are down 10.7%, and robberies are down by 20%. Even motor vehicle theft, which was an epidemic during the COVID emergency, is down by a whopping 26% from April 2024.

Much of the crime drop is fueled by nearly every major city reporting double-digit decreases in crime.

At the end of May, Baltimore reported a 23.6% drop in homicides and a 23.4% drop in nonfatal shootings. In April, only five homicides were reported in the city, the lowest total for any month since the Baltimore police began tracking homicide data in 1970.

Others are showing even more dramatic drops. Through May, homicides in St. Louis dropped by 31.6%, Cleveland by 36%, Denver by 63%, New York by 27%, Chicago by 24%, and New Orleans by 30%.

As of June 4, Philadelphia recorded 94 homicides, down from 113 homicides through June 4, 2024.

“Whatever the factors affecting the crime drop, it’s happening in virtually every city in the U.S. and for almost every crime in the United States,” said Alexis Piquero, who was director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics under President Biden.

Police officers and criminal justice specialists said there was no single reason for the decline in violent crime. Because crime is often tied to local influences, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact reason.

Some experts say a key reason is that Americans have reversed course and demanded tough-on-crime actions after years of rising crime and liberal prosecutors and politicians pushing criminal justice reform. They credit the tone Mr. Trump set during the campaign as a factor.

“What the Trump campaign did was make it safer for politicians to go back to being law and order politicians,” said Betsy Brantner Smith, spokeswoman for the National Police Association. “That gave politicians running for reelection sort of permission to say, ‘I back the police too.’”

Marc Levin, chief policy counsel at the Council on Criminal Justice, said Mr. Trump’s rhetoric could have an indirect effect.

“I do think that people who are kind of leading figures in the Democratic Party, particularly in urban areas, had a sense that if they don’t address crime in a more serious way and convince the public that we are doing that, we are ceding the issue politically,” he said.

Voters had become fed up with soft-on-crime policies after years of sharp increases in violent crime during the pandemic crisis. By the end of 2021, the national homicide rate was 44% higher than it was in 2019. It started to recede in 2022 but remained 24% higher during the first half of 2023 than in the first half of 2019. That’s when it started to decline.

Much of that was fueled by voters expressing their frustration at the ballot box with liberal prosecutors funded by George Soros and with lawmakers who called for defunding the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in Minneapolis Police custody.

The backlash suddenly made it cool for lawmakers to back the blue. Both parties proposed tough-on-crime bills, and police officers felt more publicly supported.

It’s hard to determine whether Mr. Trump’s rhetoric helped fuel that backlash or whether the shifting attitude sent him to the White House.

Mr. Piquero dismissed the idea that Mr. Trump’s railing against the violent crime in America helped fuel the reversal.

“People are going to commit crimes regardless of what a politician says. A kid who is going to pick up a gun to settle a beef could care less what Biden or Trump may have said,” he said.

Mr. Piquero noted that crime was not among the top issues of the 2024 election campaign. A Gallup poll of voters ahead of the presidential election ranked crime 10th among top voter concerns, far behind the No. 1 issue, the economy.

In the years after the crime spike, lawmakers from both parties enacted laws rolling back criminal justice reforms that lowered penalties and reduced the prison population. Tough-on-crime initiatives made a roaring comeback last year, even in states that reliably vote for Democrats.

California residents last year overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure that toughened penalties for drug- and theft-related crimes. In Colorado, voters approved a ballot measure requiring prisoners to serve more time before qualifying for parole.

Also last year, Louisiana enacted a law to try 17-year-olds as adults. Oregon enacted a law recriminalizing the drugs it had decriminalized.

Even locally, voters appeared eager to crack down on crime. In March 2024, San Francisco voters approved a measure expanding police surveillance power and imposing drug tests on welfare recipients.

Voters also soured on the Soros-linked district attorneys and flipped the script on their woke attitude toward crime.

More than a dozen of the 25 Soros-connected district attorneys were defeated or recalled in last year’s elections. Many of the losing Soros candidates were in heavily Democratic jurisdictions where Vice President Kalama won comfortably.

Former Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, backed by Mr. Soros, lost by 24 percentage points to his tough-on-crime opponent, Nathan Hochman.

“One of the big factors for the decrease in crime is the political shift in this country,” Ms. Brantner-Smith said. “You are now seeing people getting arrested, and in some places, getting prosecuted. Is Donald Trump 100% responsible for that? No. But the Trump administration and the shift we saw last year getting Donald Trump and others like him elected was absolutely huge.”