Trump is talking so you know what that means? Another drug lord is being created only to be foiled by the White House.
In the unending Scooby-Doo adventure that is the Trump administration, President Trump spoke to a gathering of police chiefs in Florida—which might be my second worst nightmare (my first worst nightmare is living in an America in which every song I listen to sounds like it’s being sung by Sen. Susan Collins)— and he took credit for ending a crime wave of epic proportions.
“Before I took office less than two years ago, our nation was experiencing an historic surge in violent crime,” Trump said, according to Think Progress
“In 2015 [and] 2016, an additional 128,000 violent crimes were committed nationwide compared to the previous two years — that’s a tremendous number of additional crime [sic],” Trump said. “Over the same period, we witnessed the steepest two-year consecutive increase in murders in nearly half a century. But we are turning that tide around very rapidly…By the end of this year, murders in major cities are estimated by drop by close to 10 percent from their levels in 2016.”
The only problem with Trump’s rant (besides the fact that Trump is lying) is the fact THAT TRUMP IS LYING!
Here’s how Think Progress breaks it down.
It is not the case, however, that America was in the throes of a violent crime surge when Trump took office.
While there have been short-term violent crime spikes in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, recent data from the Brennan Center for Justice shows that violent crime in America’s largest cities has been steadily decreasing for more than two decades — through both Democratic and Republican administrations.
In general, year-to-year crime statistics like the ones Trump cited in his speech tend to be highly variable, so the long-term trend is the more important indicator.
Think Progress also notes that this is kind of a Trump thing in which he creates a monster and the takes credits for being the Ghostbusters.
In January, the Department of Justice and White House touted FBI crime statistics showing a very slight 0.8 percent drop in U.S. violent crime in 2017 by suggesting that Americans were hopelessly mired in crime-ravaged communities until Trump took office and turned the situation around.
That bullshit drop in crime since Trump took office pales in the face of real crime drops like the 4.4 percent drop in violent crime in 2013.
Oh, and Trump also called for a push to implement “stop-and-frisk” more commonly called “The failed Giuliani” in Chicago.
“It works, and it was meant for problems like Chicago,” he said Monday, New York Magazine reports. “It was meant for it. Stop-and-frisk. And Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, had a very strong program of stop-and-frisk, and it went from an unacceptably dangerous city to one of the safest cities in the country and I think the safest big city in the country. So it works.”
Not only is stop-and frisk unconstitutional, but there is no data that shows it worked.
Here’s how The Washington Post explains it.
But it didn’t work really well — or, at least, there’s no real correlation between the use of stop-and-frisk and New York’s reduction in crime.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has collected data on stop-and-frisks from 2002 to the present. We can compare that to FBI data on crime rates (including preliminary 2015 estimates from the Brennan Center for Justice) and see how the use of the tactic compared to the rate of violent crimes or murders.
Simply put, there’s almost no correlation.
And because the president is trash and only the president of white men and women who leave their teeth in mason jars on their nightstands before bed, Trump encouraged the police to applaud his dictatorship efforts that include attacking the media and Democrats.
Police officers at the conference were confused when this photo appeared on the Jumbotron during Trump’s speech.