How did American Crime get so Bad?
And how to fix it
Donald Trump is making a play for the 98% of Americans who are not professional criminals.
Democrats, of course, are taking the bait, calling his pledge to reduce murder in Washington DC as "fascist.”
Just a week in, the results have been pretty stunning. According to the DC Police Union, violent crime and car theft are down 21%. Robbery is down 46%.
Carjacking -- the crime that set it off after DOGE employee Big Ballz got jacked -- is down 83%.
So how did crime get so bad? And how can Trump fix it.
How America got Dangerous
The first mystery is voters hate violent crime, obviously. Yet American cities have crime rates rivaling Haiti.
Suggesting there's some slippage between what voters want and what politicians deliver.
A recent Yougov poll found Americans think we're not tough enough on crime by a 4-to-1 margin.
This seems like a freebie for any enterprising politician. El Salvador's based President Bukele hit 90% approval after cutting murder 96% -- it’s now safer than Vermont.
So it's possible. And it's popular. So why doesn't it happen.
2 reasons: Progressive laws that coddle criminals.
And progressive budgets that raid police and prisons and hand the money to activists.
The Progressive laws happened in the 1960's, when the Progressive Warren court tied police -- and judges' -- hands by restricting voluntary confessions, tossing good-faith evidence and warrants, and funding hundreds of thousands of public defenders.
These slashed the odds of doing time -- Nobel Economist Gary Becker estimated that by the late 60's the expected sentence for murder was just 5 years. For robbery it was 3 months. For car theft or burglary it was less than 2 weeks.
In other words, if a burglary netted just $128 — 2 week’s wages at McDonald’s in 1968 — it was rational to burgle for a living. The mystery being why didn’t more people do it.
Courts responded to the collapse in convictions by plea-bargaining over 90% of crimes -- with an average 80% discount off the sentence. Because at least they could get them off the streets for a couple days.
Toss in aggressive prosecution of police — funded with government grants to left-wing NGO’s — and this made it very hard to catch, prosecute, and imprison criminals.
And when they were imprisoned they got out fast.
As the laws went soft, meanwhile city and state budgets were raided by Progessives, most notoriously closing the asylums that dumped half a million insane people into the streets, giving us an instant nationwide homeless crisis that, of course, was blamed on Ronald Reagan and capitalism.
During Covid, of course, they moved on to literally emptying the prisons while defunding police budgets.
The result is career criminals with zero fear, while police resources are starved.
To give a sense, the Congressional Research Service estimates up to 400,000 rape kits sit untested -- literally expiring while the rapists run free.
How to Fix it?
We’ve already done the easy part: raising prison sentences.
In fact, that’s why crime fell since its 1990’s peak — we partly cancelled the drop in probability of punishment with longer sentences for the few who do get nailed.
Unfortunately this led to 1.3 million people incarcerated — at $45,000 (federal) to 65,000 (state) per prisoner. While crime’s still 3 times higher than the early 60’s.
To get there the quickest fix is flood the zone with enforcement and police resources -- that's what El Salvador did, and it’s what Trump’s doing in DC right now.
So take the trillions we spend invading Afghanistans -- or propping up Ukraine -- and use it to protect actual Americans. Starting with the roughly 8 million open warrants — people who should be arrested but are not for lack of police resources.
The longer game is reverse those 1960's decisions.
So allow good-faith warrants and exclusionary rules, voluntary confessions, restrict plea bargains and defund the public defender industrial complex that's currently protecting criminals and illegals.
And if the court won't play ball? The nuclear option: suspend habeas corpus. Meaning mass sweeps and no trials like Lincoln and FDR did -- and Bush the second tried in Guantanamo.
This probably won't happen. But Trump's style is 100% to bring it up.
What’s Next
Trump won the White House by turning the historically deep-blue Rust Belt into a sea of Trump voters.
If he goes all-in on law-and-order cities like New York, Philly, and Chicago could go purple enough to flip the state.
Yes, even California.
Progressives will fight every inch for criminals. Like they fight for illegals, another reliably blue demographic. But Trump's got the opportunity of a lifetime not only to protect millions of Americans, but to gut Democrats’ last bastion: the cities.
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