In 2023, the third year of Joe Biden’s presidency, crime rates in the United States declined significantly, despite public perceptions. As NBC News reported, the good news continued in 2024:
Statistics released Tuesday by the FBI indicate that violent crime decreased overall in the United States by 4.5% last year. … According to the FBI, murder and nonnegligent manslaughter decreased an estimated 14.9%, robbery decreased an estimated 8.9% rape decreased an estimated 5.2%, and aggravated assault decreased an estimated 3.0%. Property crime also decreased an estimated 8.1% from 2023 to 2024, and hate crimes decreased an estimated 1.5%, the report found.
To be sure, none of this comes as a big surprise. After a spike in crime rates toward the end of Donald Trump’s first term, national data showed improvements throughout the Biden era.
The FBI’s findings did stand out in a political context, however, in large part because the facts made clear just how brazenly many Republican leaders lied to the public during the 2024 campaign season.
In September 2024, for example, as early voting got underway in some states, then-candidate Trump said anyone who believed the evidence pointing to lower crime rates had “a serious brain problem.” A week later, the Republican added that crime rates were “through the roof,” adding that “only a stupid person” would accept the evidence as real.
Around the same time, Trump told a Michigan audience, “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped.”
He had plenty of company. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina similarly told a national television audience during the campaign that Americans were confronting “a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades.” Around the same time, then-House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik condemned what she called Biden’s “violent crime crisis.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson made similar comments, declaring, “We can’t survive the dramatic increases in violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats’ policies have brought upon our communities.” We know why they were all lying — leading GOP voices clearly believed that if Americans were scared of crime, they might be more likely to vote for Republicans — but that doesn’t make their campaign of brazen deceptions any less offensive. As for the incumbent president, Trump hasn’t yet commented on the evidence he implored people to disregard, though if recent history is any guide, the odds are good that he’ll describe the new data as “rigged.” What’s more, it’s not yet clear whether FBI Director Kash Patel’s job might be in jeopardy for releasing information to the public that the White House finds politically inconvenient. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
