Two Truths About Crime in America

As Trump expands his powers using crime as a justification, neither sensationalists nor denialists have a monopoly on the truth about the nation's crime problem

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Years ago, I was waiting at a Metro stop in proximity of the nation’s capital when I encountered a group of teenagers who were in some kind of brawl. Eventually, one of them fell to the ground and one of his colleagues ran up to him and started kicking him. The injured teenager eventually started gasping and spitting out blood.

I darted to the Metro staff to alert them, and they responded in a glacial pace to help the injured kid. The assailant easily absconded up the escalator. I’m sure to many transit and other municipal officials in the Washington, D.C. area, it was just another teenage brawl on the Metro.

But these sorts of sights would be shocking if you were in charge of running the train system in a modern city like Tokyo or London. To much of the rest of the world, the amount of violence that Americans put up with is shocking.

(This is particularly acute with guns; I’m pretty sure the average Brit thinks that each American family gifts their newborn an AR-15 as they leave the hospital.)

This is something that President Donald Trump may be keenly aware of. Not only has he defied political odds time and time again to return to the White House, but he is a well-traveled man who has been to every corner of the globe. He knows that fears of American crime are prevalent around the country and around the world, and he has been able to emotionally connect with those fears.

So it’s not a surprise that he has started deploying federal agents to major American cities in what his administration is portraying as an historic crime-fighting effort.

His critics, with some justification, have argued that these deployments are political theater. Why are National Guard units being tasked with picking up trash? Isn’t it the police’s job to stop crime? And isn’t crime falling, anyway?

But these objections are unsatisfactory to many Americans who continue to fear the levels of crime that do exist across the United States — crime that is particularly concentrated in certain regions.

To understand the politics and the reality of Trump’s crime strategy, you have to hold two truths in your mind.

Yes, crime is falling — pretty much everywhere.

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Three weeks ago, as Trump was starting his blitzkrieg of federal agents into Washington, D.C., CNN fact checker Daniel Dale was quick to point out that violent crime has been falling in the nation’s capital for the past two years.

He quoted Jeff Asher, a whip smart crime analyst, who noted that “the city’s official violent crime rate in 2024 was the second lowest that has been reported since 1966.”

As far as I can tell, all of this is true. There are conspiracy theories bandied about that claim that police or other public officials are suppressing the true crime statistics, but there isn’t any evidence of any systematic rigging of the data. The most reliable crime statistic is homicide — because hiding bodies is pretty hard — and homicides have seen an admirable decline the past couple years. Whatever D.C. police have been doing, it appears to have started to work.

And thankfully, the rest of the country is seeing a similar success story. Violent crime has seen massive declines from region to region the past two years, and even some of our historically most troubled cities — like Baltimore — are included in that statistic. The Maryland city that sits a short drive from D.C. has seen the fewest homicides it has experienced in more than 50 years:

Per the numbers from City Hall, Baltimore recorded seven homicides in August and 91 homicides from January to August — which marks a 29.5% drop compared to the same timeframe last year and the fewest number of homicides in the city in more than 50 years.

As someone who spent time reporting on murders in Baltimore, all I can say is that this is astonishingly good news.

In his public statements on the matter, Trump is not acknowledging any of this progress. He is not offering praise for local police departments and public officials who contributed to these declines, nor designing further anti-crime interventions alongside them. He is, as Democrats are implying, playing the role of a demagogue who is inciting fear and using these fears to expand his personal power.

And yet there is still a fair amount of public support for Trump’s description of the crime problems and his proposed solutions.

Why is that?

But violent crime in America continues to be shockingly high

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Let’s return to that anecdote I described above about the D.C. Metro. The day I witnessed that brutal act of violence, I happened to tell a colleague about it at a progressive-leaning publication I was working for. I told them that I wanted to alert the police to help the teenager that was being assaulted. They upbraided me on the suggestion, telling me that…calling the police could’ve been a death sentence for the teen.

Excuse me? I was watching a teen being beat up so badly he was coughing up blood and their concern was that police would emerge and gun everybody down for…whatever reason.

There are times where I think that the right-wing radio description of progressive thought is pure caricature. And it often is. But something conservatives are correct about is that many progressives have been deeply ensconced in crime denial and downplaying criminal violence as part of a larger mission to reduce police violence.

While police reform is a worthwhile topic, the inability to hold two ideas in their heads has led many progressives to talk themselves into strange corners like the one I described above.

While Trump has used caustic and divisive rhetoric about crime, and it’s not clear what his federal deployments will actually achieve in the long run — National Guard and FBI are not meant to patrol city streets, and this isn’t an efficient way to assist police who do — he is tapping into a very real sentiment about safety that exists among Americans.

While many people are quick to point out that Americans often think crime is rising when it’s actually falling, it’s not entirely irrational to fear criminal violence in our country when we still have so much of it.

One of my favorite documentaries is Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which explores the question of why America has so much violence. Unlike virtually every other film that Moore has made, he doesn’t settle on just one answer to the question in this film, and he even presents conflicting arguments.

At one point in the movie, he demonstrates that America sees far more gun murders than just about every other country out there save for places that might be in literal wars. At another point, he blames the media for injecting Americans with an endless stream of fear about crime. Yet as he demonstrates, there is sometimes good reason to fear crime in America.

This year, which has been a pretty good year for murder in Chicago — violent crime has been declining there like everywhere else — the homicide rate was about 18 per 100,000. If you look at other developed countries, this would be an astoundingly high rate. Japan, which was once so warlike it waged a campaign of murder and genocidal violence throughout Asia, typically has a murder rate of less than 1 per 100,000. Seoul, South Korea, and Chicago, Illinois, have similar populations. In 2021, there were more than 800 murders in Chicago; forget Seoul, there were fewer murders than that in the entire country of South Korea.

So how should Democrats respond to Trump’s crime moves?

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This opens up a dilemma for the Democratic Party. Trump is denying progress that the country has made on crime over the past few years and exaggerating the levels of crime in this country as he’s engaged in a power grab that could vastly expand his personal power.

Yet despite progress that has been made in reducing America’s level of violent crime, America still has an astounding amount of violence.

This suggests that the most politically savvy path for Democrats is two-fold: they have to acknowledge progress on crime while also acknowledging the public’s rightly held fears about our progress not being good enough.

I’d suggest something like this:

We’ve made real progress on crime the past few years. America’s police officers deserve credit for everything they’ve done to arrest criminals and bring down the levels of murder and shooting in our cities and everywhere else. But Americans are right that we have a long way to go to make this country as safe as it should be. No American should feel unsafe to walk any street at night, and no child should be afraid of some lunatic gunning them down while they’re at school or while they’re at home. That’s why we have to do more to give our police the resources they need to battle crime. But our military is for fighting and winning wars — not for fighting the American people. Let’s support our police and build a safer country, not walk down the path to a dictatorship.

As far as I know, most Democrats are not able to find a balance here. You have some like California’s Gavin Newsom playing a game of “I know you are but what am I” by pointing out that cities in the South actually have the worst violent crime. That’s not a particularly resonating argument because most Americans see that violence as a consequence of social and historical factors, and the national media is based in New York and Los Angeles, not Birmingham and St. Louis. The only viable way I see of pushing back is by owning the crime issue by acknowledging Americans’ righteous fears without giving in to Trump’s fearmongering and expansive abuses of power.