Rachel Huss, Staff Writer
On Tuesday, April 2, 2024, former President Donald Trump spoke in Michigan to his supporters and the American people. In his speech on violent crime from illegal immigrants, a false claim was made. The former president claimed that violent crimes in the United States have increased during the Biden presidency, and that a lot of these crimes have been perpetrated by illegal immigrants.
Image sourced from Bloomberg
However, according to preliminary statistics presented through the Federal Borough of Investigation (FBI), crime has actually dropped since 2023. Anna Harvey, a Political Science Professor and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, states, “During 2020, the last year of the Trump presidency, violent crime rose dramatically. The murder, for example, increased by almost 30%, the largest one-year increase on record. But violent crime has been falling during the Biden presidency”. Her public safety lab works closely with several communities, law enforcement agencies, and even researchers in order to design and test different criminal justice strategies. Along with her goal to promote effective criminal justice, she researches overall crime.
Unfortunately, regardless of how well the crime rate has decreased in America, some crime has still proceeded. For example, there has been a spike in auto thefts in large cities that has been prompted by social media when it displayed how some car models are easier than others to break into.
The big picture is that categories of crime such as murder, rape, assault, robbery, and arson have decreased severely and that the FBI has suggested that the rate of crime in 2023 is extremely close to being as low as it was in the 1960s.
Sources:
