2017 statistics debunk Trump & Sessions’s crime fear-mongering

One way Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have tried to defend their tough-on-crime posturing is by pointing to (when not lying about) a supposed massive wave of violence sweeping through America’s cities. Their evidence: Some large cities saw an abnormal increase in violent crime in 2016, ignoring every other statistic that shows the overall crime rate has been dropping for decades across the country.

Now the 2017 numbers are in, and they show that trend is still going strong:

New analysis from the Brennan Center:

All measures of crime in the 30 largest American cities — the overall crime rate, violent crime rate, and murder rate — are estimated to decline in 2017 according to a year-end analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

Crime in 2017: Updated Analysis directly undercuts any claims of a nationwide crime wave.

Key findings from the analysis include:

• The overall crime rate in the 30 largest cities in 2017 is estimated to decline slightly from [2016], falling by 2.7 percent.

• The violent crime rate will also decrease slightly, by 1.1 percent, essentially remaining stable.

• The 2017 murder rate in the 30 largest cities is estimated to decline by 5.6 percent. Large decreases this year in Chicago [down 11.9 percent] and Detroit [down 9.8 percent], as well as small decreases in other cities, contributed to this decline. … New York City’s murder rate will also decline again, to 3.3 killings per 100,000 people.

[…]

This is all very good news. The question now is if Trump and Sessions will continue to lie about the crime rate in America, or now that they’ve been in office for a year, if they’ll try to take credit for it.

It’s disheartening, in a jaded way, how difficult it is to tell which it’ll be. In fact, the only uncertainty revolves around whether Trump and Sessions’ policies, governed by their law-and-order shtick and unconstrained by facts, may slow or even reverse this trend. Given Trump & co.’s penchant for tainting absolutely everything, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.