Fox News discussion of homicide rates being highest under Donald Trump in 2020
It’s an election year, and so “crime” is being hyped by Republicans, but over on Fox News viewers heard something that probably surprised them: “The highest jump in the murder rate in this country happened in the last year of the Trump administration. It didn’t happen in any of the Biden years.”
Watch here:
“Listen, the president had all major police chiefs to the White House just last month. Violent crime is across the board, down in most major cities. And that’s something we need to talk about, certainly as Democrats. The highest jump in the homicide rate, the murder rate in this country, annually, happened in the last year of the Trump administration. It didn’t happen in any of the Biden years over these last three years.
So again, the president is running on his record. Donald Trump is now is a different situation than 2016 has a record he’s got to defend as well.”
It’s true that Trump isn’t in the same situation as he was in 2016, when “give him a chance” was a talking point plea. Now, Trump has a record to defend.
President Biden had a meeting with police chiefs from major cities in February, during which they celebrated the large drops in crime rates across the country.
Biden pointed to the American Rescue Plan, which was supported with only votes from Democrats, as an important help to cities during the pandemic. I’d also point out that this included a change in policing to include more mental health and youth intervention programs. Republicans like to point at Chicago and Detroit as examples of high crime cities, so it’s notable that Detroit saw an 18% drop in homicides in 2023, while Chicago saw a 13% drop in homicides.
“Last year, the United States had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in more than 50 years,” the Democratic President told police officials in that meeting.
Separately, in 2021, Biden’s Department of Justice instituted a violent crime reduction strategy. These are deliberate policies Biden enacted, and thus can take credit for.
In 2023, Reuters reported, “Violent crimes including murder and rape declined in the United States in 2022 from a year earlier, but property crimes rose during the same period… Although violent crime is trending downward, the 21,156 murders reported in 2022 are also well above pre-pandemic levels, according to FBI data. The number of annual reported murders never topped 18,000 during the 2010s, but jumped to 21,570 in 2020.”
So that high of 21,570 for murder happened in Trump’s last year as president, which was also the first year of the pandemic. The numbers have dropped since with a 12% decline in homicides from 2022 to 2023.
Is it fair to saddle Trump with the pandemic numbers? Fair doesn’t play a large role in politics, but the truth is we don’t know how those numbers might have changed under a different administration, one that had handled the pandemic from the beginning with competence. Trump simply tried to gaslight his way out of the pandemic and by the time they figured out that it was real and it was a problem, it was too late.
So while it’s not completely fair to assign the high murder rate to Trump, it’s also evident that his handling of the pandemic was disastrous for the country and no doubt that did impact the murder rates.
Violent crime has mostly been going down for decades, since the first term of President Bill Clinton’s administration, with a 2020 pandemic or Trump bump.
Historically, Americans trust Republicans more on crime, which makes this clip even more interesting and raises the question, if legislation passed by only Democrats helped major cities reduce homicide rates, is it accurate to continue the notion that Republicans are “better” on violent crime than Democrats?
Perhaps the real issue is the racial dog whistles being communicated to the Republican base rather than the facts, which might explain why this Fox panel immediately pivoted to “cartels” bringing drugs across the border after being faced with facts that challenged their biases and beliefs. Yes, they pivoted to the border, which Republicans have refused to fund properly in an effort to wound President Biden politically.
No matter how fair or unfair it is, Donald Trump has to defend his record just like every other politician and he should be held accountable for his failures as well as any successes he might have had.
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