Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a website for Never Trumper Republicans that has some of the best writing on the current state of politics. In this post, Last explains that Trump presided over a period of crime “American carnage,” Trump called it), but crime has dropped during Biden’s term in office.
Last writes:
Remember the bad old days when people lost their minds about the crime wave Joe Biden had unleashed on America with his woke whatever-whatever policies?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Well I’ve got some great news for you: Joe Biden has won the war on crime.
Here’s a headline from the WSJ that Heather Mac Donald might want to see: Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities.
And this isn’t a one-time drop. It’s an acceleration of a trend that began in 2023.
How many stories have the Washington Examiner and the WSJ op-ed page written about these facts?
I’ll let you guess. But wait—there’s even more good news.
The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.
Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.
And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.
Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.
The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.
Like the man said: Take the W.
In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.
You are better off now than you were four years ago.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So, where is the DNC, explaining this (and so much else) to people? NOWHERE. This organization is clueless and useless.
Republicans beat the crime drum because they win either way. No matter how good things get, someone will be deviant enough to commit violent crime at s rate that will affect someone you know. Republicans are always ready to hang the crime around the neck of the democrats and the so called liberal press helps them because they are not liberal at all but are trying to sell news.
should Biden celebrate the drop in violent crime? You bet. Will the press give him credit? No, because the remaining crime will make the voters think nothing has changed.
Back in the early part of the last century, hanging criminals was a spectator sport. Did it stop crime? Hardly, it was just an aspect of a violent society that caused crime. What it did accomplish was the burnishing of reputations got local political purposes.
Biden should only get “credit” for falling crime to the extent he was blamed for rising crime. Crime is a local phenomenon with, for the most part, local causes. And we only had a huge percentage in crime because we had an even bigger percentage increase in 2020. So this is a bit of a silly game.
“huge percentage [decrease] in crime”
I cannot write a comment without typos or missing words.
while I generally agree that crime is local, there are national policies that affect the crime that happens locally.
A case in point is the effect of the 1920s agricultural depression and the prohibition of legal liquor. Illegal liquor spawned a rural crime wave, so bad in many places that little enclaves of desperation became murder capitals for a brief time. The 18th district, a political division in my own county, became nationally known. There are still people here who recall the “bloody 18th”.
As for Biden, the only thing I sense he might have contributed to less crime is that people are going back to work after the pandemic. Also, Trump’s years were filled with his ongoing grievance factory, which might have added to the tension a bit.
Under Biden the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in decades.
What do studies show?
“Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime”
“In this paper, we analyze the relationship between unemployment and crime. Using U.S. state data, we estimate the effect of unemployment on the rates of seven felony offenses. We control extensively for state‐level demographic and economic factors and estimate specifications that include state‐specific time trends, state effects, and year effects. In addition, we use prime defense contracts and a state‐specific measure of exposure to oil shocks as instruments for unemployment rates. We find significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime rates that are stable across model specifications. Our estimates suggest that a substantial portion of the decline in property crime rates during the 1990s is attributable to the decline in the unemployment rate. The evidence for violent crime is considerably weaker. However, a closer analysis of the violent crime of rape yields some evidence that the employment prospects of males are weakly related to state rape rates.”
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/320275
If Traitor Trump returns to the White House as a dictator, since he says that’s what hes going to do, and follows through with what he has said he will do as a dictator, expect the crime rate in the US to soar higher than it has ever been before.
How will an all powerful dictator called Trump react?
I think Dictator Trump will declare martial law and sick the military on the US population to brutally crack down on everyone, using that crime rate as an excuse to set up concentration camps across the United States to hold tens of millions of citizens. By then the immigrants will all be gone so the only people left to send to Trump’s death camps will be citizens that are not white and/or didn’t vote for him.
Bill Clinton was president from January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001. And during his term, there was a budget surplus.
What about the unemployment rates when Clinton was president?
Under Clinton, “Unemployment at Its Lowest Level in More than 30 Years: Overall unemployment has dropped to the lowest level in more than 30 years, down from 6.9 percent in 1993 to just 4.0 percent in November 2000. The unemployment rate has been below 5 percent for 40 consecutive months.”
And the Republicans in the House impeached Clinton because he had a consensual affair with an adult intern and lied about it.
Clinton didn’t create a fake paper trail like Traitor Trump did to hide his affairs (PLURAL). Clinton lied under oath that he didn’t have an affair.
Why did the Republicans in the House investigating another issue regarding Clinton that no evidence supported, ask him that question?
Yet, Clinton did his job as president better than any Republican President after Eisenhower before and after Clinton’s term.
This is yet another example of the extreme partisanship that should be beneath any genuine scholar. Crime is overwhelmingly a local phenomenon in its causes, its effects, its perpetrators, and its victims. No U.S. President has any meaningful influence on local and state crime rates.
so you recognize the “extreme partisan “ nature of the last 40 years of the Republicans’ demagogue of the issue
Ever since Nixon’s presidential campaigns, accusations that national Democratic leadership is “soft on crime” has been a mainstay of Repugnican demagoguery. Immigration as well. And racist dog whistling. These are the mainstays of Republican campaigning. Oh, and another one used to be stopping the evil Russians. That’s before Trump dragged the whole party into bed with Vladimir.
See my note below, Ben.
Crime will be a big issue in this fall’s presidential election.
It will if the Supremes decide Trump isn’t immune.
Remember Trump’s line about “American carnage” in his Inaugural address?
Bannon is a racist populist. He was trying to push Trump to be one, too. He wrote the inaugural speech, which pushed an agenda of massive infrastructure works to employ bluecollar people–you know, of the kind that Roosevelt instituted as part of his recovery plan. So, while Bannon is a vile, evil freaking racist, he had this going for him. Trump dutifully mouthed the words, but he had no interest in actually pursuing an infrastructure plan because Trump does not give a shadow of a shit for ordinary, working Americans. He wants to surround himself with other rich, fat slobs, preferably ones who worship him, as at Mar-a-lago.