The U.S. experienced a surge in violent crime and civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd by the police in 2020. President Trump portrayed himself as the “law and order president,” assailing “weak” liberals and calling demonstrators “domestic terrorists.”
Joe Biden, who followed a centrist course on law enforcement as a senator, vice president and presidential candidate, vowed to address racial inequities in policing while supporting the police.
In 2024, reported violent crime is down. Homicide rates are well below pandemic highs funding for law enforcement is up, and tensions between the police and communities of color no longer are at a boiling point.
Property crime, carjackings and smash-and-grab burglaries are up, adding to a sense of lawlessness reflected on social media and local online message boards.
Trump is re-upping his blunt, visceral appeal to voter anxieties, the New York Times reports. He says “crime is rampant and out of control like never before,” promised to shoot shoplifters, embraced the “back the blue” slogan against liberal changes to police departments — and falsely accused the FBI of fabricating positive crime data to help Biden.
For his part, Biden has spotlighted improving violent crime rates, promoted his vast increases in funding to law enforcement and cited an aggressive push on gun control, as well as a revived effort to hold local departments accountable for discriminatory and dangerous policing practices in minority neighborhoods.
White House officials believe the data are on their side, even if in some cities rates of violent crime remain elevated from prepandemic levels. Polls suggest the public is less focused on the areas of documentable progress than on lingering problems.
“Unemployment is down, the economy is up, violence is down and the president’s got a 40 percent approval rating in the state of Michigan,” said Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit. “It makes you wonder what the definition of success is,” added Duggan, a Democrat. His city’s homicide total declined 18 percent from January 2023 to January 2024.
“I think it’s fairly easy to characterize what’s happened between 2020 and 2024,” said Adam Gelb of the think tank Council on Criminal Justice. “Violent crime went up and is now generally coming back down, while property crime went down and is now generally coming back up.”
Murders are down about 13 percent nationally from 2022 to 2023. Other serious crimes — sexual assault, robbery and assault — are also settling to prepandemic levels in all but a handful of cities. Property crimes like theft, especially auto theft and shoplifting, are rising moderately from pandemic lows — and carjackings doubled from 2019 to 2023.
Biden made law enforcement a focus of his economic recovery package, the enormous American Rescue Plan Act, which passed in 2022 without a single Republican vote.
“During his administration, there’s no doubt we have seen historic increases in the amounts of federal money going to law enforcement,” said Jim Pasco of the Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Trump in 2020.
“I’ve always known Biden to be a very strong proponent of public safety, though I don’t believe that’s necessarily true for everyone in his administration,” Pasco said. “Now, will he get credit for that? He should, but who knows?”