Policing based on false data, misleading information, and executive policies may have caused crime to increase in the United States.
In 2019–20 the U.S. had experienced a significant increase in crime rates, as murder rose to its highest peak since 1960. Police brutality may have enabled criminal behavior, but in the eyes of U.S. citizens it delegitimizes policing altogether, according to DNYUZ.
Scholars agree that the rise in crime was connected to the 2020 murder of George Floyd; as a result of his death, protests became prevalent, which may have served as a pathway to higher crime rates.
“President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing,” stated the publication.
Trump contended that the deportation of undocumented people would reduce crime; he encouraged the removal of a Justice Department webpage that reported on crime rates of undocumented people, whose crime rates were lower than the citizens of Texas.
The President’s executive action defunded an $800 million dollar grant for a gun control program, founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Gifford, which was geared to help reduce crime, the new article said.
These alternative policies may have caused crime to increase after its decrease, and further may enable a recession, as happened in 2020.
A December 2020 report by the Brookings Institute suggested that Covid-19 was the culprit in the increase of crime; the authors of the report claim crime was already on the rise before Floyd’s death.
“The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,” they write. “Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.”
The Real-Time Crime Index states that through March of 2020 crime rates were down, murder 21.6%, violent crime 11%, and property crime was down 13.8%, noted the article.
The media has faced challenges in getting good data, which makes reporting on crime rates difficult. The FBI has the top crime rate analysis, but it doesn’t release the information until the next year.
In 2024 data retrieved by the Council on Criminal Justice, on the reduction of crime rates from 13 categories in more than 40 cities, stated that all crimes decreased except for shoplifting.
Homicide decreased by 16% in some cities that reported the data; in major cities with high levels of murder rates such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, homicide fell to 2014 levels. Even though auto theft was higher, carjacking was below 2020 levels.“Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 will likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start,” noted DNYUZ.
