The Major Cities Chiefs Association has released their Midyear Violent Crime survey, and Axios reports on the results:
New preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows a sharp drop in violent crime in the first half of the year — more than 25% in some communities — as the COVID-era crime wave recedes.
Ah yes, that Covid-era crime wave...
I don't know why President Joe Biden doesn't get credit for taming the pandemic, and I don't know why Trump doesn't get blamed for his disastrous failures that made the pandemic so much more horrific. As a study published by the National Institutes of Health concluded:
The US, although it represents just 4% of the world's population, accounted for over 20% of all confirmed COVID‐19 cases and deaths worldwide that took place on Trump's watch (Johns Hopkins University, 2022). This outcome was not inevitable. With a timelier, focused, scientifically informed, and sustained whole‐of‐government response, it has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of COVID‐19 deaths could have been avoided (Redlener et al., 2020; Woolhandler et al., 2021). Ultimately, in the US system, as the commander‐in‐chief, presidents are responsible for the decisions the federal government makes or fails to make, the mobilization and coordination of the federal response to national crises, and setting and enforcing the proper priorities. In the final analysis, when it comes to assessing responsibility for the avoidable failures of the federal government's COVID‐19 performance, the evidence examined here indicates that, while not responsible for everything that went wrong, President Trump was a decisive factor behind the tragically sub‐optimal US pandemic response.
Which should be one of the main Democratic campaign themes.
But back to the crime wave Trump's pandemic disaster sparked, and Biden's success in taming that, too, back to Axios:
By the numbers: An Axios analysis of data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found an overall 6% decline in violent crime among 69 cities during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.
And some of the biggest drops were in cities in what could be key battleground states:
- Columbus, OH
- Miami, FL
- Austin, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Omaha, NE— which, if the race for Electors is close, could provide Democrats the winning margin.
Cities in non-battlegrounds that also experienced particularly large drops include:
- New Orleans, LA
- Washington, DC
Trump and Vance promote a hideous dystopian vision of the United States, which is as false as it is manipulative. The facts show, once again, that it was Trump himself who was spiraling us into dystopia, and it is Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris who are keeping America great and joyous.
Tom Sullivan at digby’s place quotes:
“Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office,” Biden said in a statement.
True.
