Crime—particularly violent crime—is down dramatically over the last year. Cities like New York, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. where murders, carjacking, and theft plagued the public in the wake of COVID-19, were all found to have experienced double-digit decreases in violent crime. Experts, the legacy media, and many Democrats are scratching their heads. As a recent New York Times headline declared, “What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure.”
Other outlets and commentators have been similarly befuddled. New York Magazine dubbed it “The Mysterious Plunge in America’s Murder Rate.” Experts “said it’s too early to tell what is prompting the change,” the Associated Press intoned; the Washington Post cited a liberal expert who cautioned that there was “no silver bullet” to make sense of the data. For TIME, the drop in violent crime “can be attributed to a kaleidoscope of factors, none of which can singularly or definitively account for the decline.” CNN shrugged that “it’s nearly impossible to zero in on any one reason” for the drop. “The bottom line: Experts aren’t sure why violent crime continues to fall,” Axios reported.
Not until 21 paragraphs into the Times piece do the authors give us a hint about how it happened: experts “do not wholly discount” policing, particularly “the multipronged effort that many cities mounted against violence in the past few years, including hot-spot policing, summer jobs for youth, cognitive behavioral therapy and focused deterrence, an approach that calls for paying sustained attention to the small number of people at highest risk of committing violence.”
In other words, violent crime is in freefall across the country thanks in large part to better, more targeted policing aimed at restoring law and order. The biggest threat to our renewed ability to combat crime might be a legacy media hamstrung by the baggage of prior anti-police animus.
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