Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg boldly declared on “Fox News Sunday” that Republicans are peddling a “false message” about the nation’s crime crisis. He criticized Fox News for suggesting that crime is rising. The Transportation Secretary believes that, in reality, crime is down under Joe Biden. Buttigieg insisted that crime rates were higher under Donald Trump and urged viewers to look up the data.
Democrat-paid social media influencers cheered like trained seals, but Buttigieg might want to stick to making electric vehicle infomercials where his reality distortion can shine. A closer look at the data reveals a politically dishonest statistical sleight of hand. While it’s true that crime surged under Trump, it was mainly due to policies Democrats instituted. After these policies were reversed, crime rates naturally fell.
Major cities across the country, predominantly run by Democrats, experienced a crime surge due to progressive “criminal justice reforms” and police defunding. These changes were driven by the demands of Black Lives Matter radicals.
When police departments were defunded, the nationwide murder rate surged by 30% in 2020, marking the largest single-year increase in over a century. The next year, we saw a 4.3% increase in murders nationwide. Before these reforms, under Trump, violent crimes were decreasing.
During the COVID pandemic, Democrats stopped booking criminals or released them early, claiming they’d face imminent death from COVID if they stayed locked up. For example, Cornelius Haney was released from prison early due to COVID-19 and was soon arrested for the murder of a 21-year-old woman in Denver. Jerry Crawford, released to reduce COVID-19 spread, was arrested two days later for shooting an 18-year-old man to death.
While Buttigieg and other Democrats try to memory-hole reality, we saw a rise in left-wing political violence by activists, including Antifa, with criminals exploiting soft-on-crime legislation, such as a ban on police vehicular pursuits in Washington state and downgrading serious felonies by George Soros-backed prosecutors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.
When Biden took office, cities like Philadelphia and Indianapolis broke records with 561 and 271 homicides, respectively. Portland, Oregon, also hit its all-time homicide high in 2022.
The surge wasn’t limited to homicides. Overall, crime spiked in New York, with assaults reaching nearly 28,000 for the first time in recorded history. State laws that only offer misdemeanor charges for thefts under $950 have led Los Angeles and San Francisco to have the highest organized retail theft rates nationwide, causing billions in business losses. Motor vehicle thefts saw triple-digit percentage increases in Denver (179%), Chicago (136%), and St. Louis (109%) between 2019 and 2022. Washington state saw a staggering 10,000% increase in catalytic converter thefts over the same period.
Ironically, crimes, including murders, were undercounted due to changes in how the FBI collects and reports data. Missing data from thousands of law enforcement agencies, including New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, painted an incomplete picture.
As crime rates soared, public sentiment shifted towards re-evaluating these reforms. By late 2022, many cities began rolling back these policies and restoring police funding. The reintroduction of stringent policing measures and increased police presence led to a noticeable decline in crime rates in 2023-2024.
After murders spiked by 43% in 2022 compared to 2021, the San Antonio Police Department rolled out a “brilliantly simple plan” to tackle the crisis—actually policing the neighborhoods that made the most 911 calls for violent crimes. Portland saw a 22% decrease in shootings and a 23% drop in homicides after reallocating funds from its police bureau in 2023. These strategies were the exact opposite of what Radical Left activists demanded.
But crime going down from record highs doesn’t mean it’s back to pre-reform levels, which is what Buttigieg would have you believe.
Annual homicides in Denver dropped 4% in 2023, yet it’s still 14% higher than in 2019. Albuquerque saw a 21% dip in homicides in 2023, but that’s still 86% higher than in 2018. Washington, D.C., had more homicides in 2023 than any other year in two decades. Seattle experienced a rise in homicides in 2020 and hit an all-time high in 2023.
Next time Democrats celebrate a Biden administration official for dunking on Fox News, they should grasp the facts, not left-wing talking points suited to MSNBC.
The hard truth is their policies led to unprecedented crime spikes. Only a return to sensible policing measures has mitigated the damage inflicted by their ideological missteps. Democrats don’t deserve credit when a crisis they created subsides after reverting to policies that flourished under Trump.