A shot in the dark - murder under U.S. presidents

Detroit viewed from across the river in Windsor, Canada.
Detroit (popn. 649,000), 252 murders last year, murder rate 23 per 100,000. 
Windsor (popn. 229,000), 10 murders last year, murder rate 2.8 per 100,000.
Do national policies cut crime?

by Gregory Saville

Last week’s 2024 U.S. election ended with Donald Trump defeating Kamala Harris. It wasn’t a landslide, but it was not a cliffhanger. Some think crime will now drop, others think it will explode.

I am amazed at how frequently crime becomes a political weapon – a well-placed gotcha for a media soundbite in the middle of a campaign. Politicians love to promise solutions to crime waves but rarely offer practical answers based on research. It’s easy to claim that one president or another will reduce crime, but can a president actually achieve this? How does a president’s term in office truly affect national crime rates?

The data show that crime is declining. There are some upward blips here and there – violent crimes against young people are up, and mass shootings and school shootings have increased. However, on the whole, most crime rates are declining.

 

Detroit police use technology, surveillance cameras,
and other programs to attempt to prevent homicides 

HOW DO WE KNOW?

I examined U.S. homicide data to see if there was a pattern with different presidents. I’m not ignoring recent increases in a few city centers. I’m simply saying that most city centers have declining homicides this year. Denver is one of them.  

I know a few things about weaknesses in crime data. Yet,  even with the limitations, we can learn something. 

I collected homicide data from 1960-2022, and graphed the results and the tenures of 11 presidents. This method obviously bypasses all the other important factors affecting homicide and it only examines a President’s term and homicide rates. Even still, it shows something worth considering.

 

KENNEDY/JOHNSON

Homicide rates exploded during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration (and continued through President Nixon's term). He (and Kennedy) launched much-heralded social programs, many of which emerged from criminologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s book Delinquency and Opportunity. 

Many of the crime prevention strategies from the Kennedy/Johnson War on Poverty were successful and survive today such as Head Start, Job Corps, and AmeriCorps.

  

President Kennedy greeting Peace Corps volunteers in 1961 - one of the social programs from his administration - photo Abbie Rowe, CC via Wikimedia Commons

Those programs were founded on the belief that improving access to legitimate opportunities for disadvantaged youth could reduce crime. Crime, particularly homicide, was supposed to decline! It didn’t!

REAGAN

Consider this – a large portion of crime, like homicide, occurs via young male offenders between 18-25 years. The youngest in that demographic born in the War on Poverty decade reached their crime-prone years in the early 1980s. Perhaps they benefited from the War on Poverty programs? The graph above shows that the early 1980s was a period of dramatic homicide declines. By then Ronald Reagan was president! 

Could it be that Ronald Reagan benefitted from Kennedy and Johnson’s War on Poverty? 

President Reagan's inauguration speech, 1981
- photo White House Photographic Collection, CC Wikimedia Commons

Probably not. By the end of Regan’s presidency, the homicide rate began increasing again. Rates climbed through the presidency of George Bush with a small decline in his last year. So much for presidential influence over crime!

CLINTON 

The most dramatic impact on homicide was from 1993 to 2001. Clinton’s tenure saw the largest homicide decline in recorded American history. It was a decline across all crime categories and it continued through George W. Bush’s tenure and into the first term of Obama. 

Did that crime decline stem from Clinton’s all-encompassing and targeted anti-crime campaign called the 1994 Crime Bill? 

It was among the largest anti-crime bill since the 1968 Safe Streets Act of Johnson’s administration. Clinton’s 1994 bill created stricter criminal sentences and violence against women laws. It hired 100,000 community police officers and banned assault rifles. It implemented the National Police Corps, an ROTC-style university degree to improve police education – a program in which I was hired as associate director of the Florida Police Corps (the program was later defunded during the Bush years). 

 

President Bill Clinton shaking hands with Donald Trump in 2000 - photo Ralph Alswang, Office of the President, CC Wikimedia Commons 

OBAMA

Clinton’s crime bill is now criticized (even by Clinton) as a trigger to mass incarceration of minority populations (a trend that actually began long before 1994). It is also unclear that the Clinton crime bill was responsible for the homicide decline because crime also dropped in countries where there was no crime bill. For example, Canada’s crime rates also started declining a few years before this bill.

President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack Obama on the Colonnade to the Oval Office, 2008 - White House photo, Eric Draper CC Wikimedia Commons

After Obama’s election in 2009, police excessive use of force spread across social media. There were anti-poverty protests, the Black Lives Matter movement and riots in city centers. It seemed impossible to predict murder rates. In the first half of Obama’s presidency, the homicide rate declined. Then it rose. Exactly the same thing happened to Trump. 

TRUMP

During the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the homicide rate declined from 5.3 to 5.0 homicides per 100,000 people. In his last two years, homicide rates jumped almost 40%, from 5.0 to 6.9. Recent election disinformation claimed otherwise, but the fact is that homicides increased at the end of Trump’s first tenure. Was he responsible? 

By now it should be obvious it is difficult to attribute homicide rates to any president. There are simply too many factors at play. And now, homicide rates are returning to pre-pandemic levels and crime is dropping. 

WHAT NOW?

Nothing here suggests that a forward-thinking presidential administration cannot make a difference. Sadly, few presidents deliberately craft a well-designed and properly implemented crime prevention policy based on proven community-building strategies. Kennedy and Johnson did that, yet it was poorly implemented, underfunded, and it largely failed. Clinton also did that and it might have cut some crime. Unfortunately, there were unintended consequences – exploding prison populations – and it’s unclear how much credit that program deserves.

The takeaway? There are well-designed, evidence-based strategies, like SafeGrowth, that do prevent crimes and sustain prevention effects for years. A presidential administration armed with the right tools and strategies can make a meaningful difference, but only through intentional and well-executed policy. History shows without that, it is a shot in the dark! 

Pictures in the sky - a vision for the unhoused in Prince George

  

Judge and Senator Calvin Murray Sinclair
- photo by Archkris, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wiki Commons

 by John Lyons

John Lyons spent many years as a patrol officer living and working in northern Canadian communities. A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 28 years, he served as a major crime investigator. For 10 years he was an international crime analyst with Interpol Ottawa. Post policing he consulted government on health care fraud. Now he brings his extensive experience to SafeGrowth, particularly in conducting search conferences to prevent crime and build collaborative networks.

This week, a giant died in Canada. I met him many years ago when I gave testimony in an inquiry that he headed as a judge. I have remained impressed by him ever since. How we could use his wise advice now! 

I speak of the Ojibway First Nations Judge and retired Canadian Senator Calvin Murray Sinclair who died on November 4th. His passing is a deep and huge loss to Canada. Judge Sinclair was a champion of crime prevention through First Nations community development. From 2009, he was a leader in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and he had a profound impact on how Canadians, such as myself, contextualize colonial abuse of First Nations peoples. 

He shaped my perspective on addressing crimes and incivilities by economic and socially marginalized First Nations people. The problems Judge Sinclair brought to light are still apparent in the cities across northern communities, especially in the northern Canadian city of Prince George, British Columbia, a community with problems of homelessness, street crime, illicit drugs, and drug overdoses. The blog "Innovations in responding to street drugs" described those issues last year. 

The Prince George story illustrates Judge Sinclair’s message most succinctly. Last year's blog was about the 2023 SafeGrowth Person of the Year, Jordan Steward, and her downtown safe inhalation, harm reduction site – The Pounds Project – which was largely defunded.

Aerial photo of Prince George, British Columbia
- photo by CPG1100, CC BY-SA via Wiki Commons

Today, when thousands of drug-addicted and unhoused people populate Canadian cities, far too many hail from Indigenous backgrounds. Where is Judge Sinclair’s perspective at this point in history when so many Canadian cities, like Prince George, are suffering from this social pain?  

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN?

First, one of the persistent paradoxes we know that emerges from top-down government responses to the unhoused, especially with people from marginalized communities, is the problem of inaction and the false belief that one-size-fits-all. True to form, this paradox has now reared its head according to news stories about conflicts between the city of Prince George and the provincial government. 

Second, having spent a great deal of time in Prince George, I have learned that it is not enough to treat the problem as an eyesore disrupting downtown businesses. The city must go beyond displacing these troubled souls to accommodations outside the city centre. This blog has previously described cities like Wheat Ridge, Colorado and Victoria, British Columbia that experienced the futility of simply rehousing the homeless without wraparound services.

 

Housing encampment in Prince George

Third, bottom-up strategies were already emerging in Prince George, for example the harm reduction that Jordan Steward attempted through her Pounds Project. That is what should be expanded and supported. We know that relocating the unhoused and drug addicted must involve far more than pushing the problem around the city like some perverse board game. We also know, from prior blogs, that successful projects already exist in places like Finland.

All these examples teach us that any relocation plan needs to consider setting up safer physical environments using strategies like 1st and 2nd-generation CPTED. They must also reinforce historic Indigenous culture. If there is to be any hope of redemption, that is the way to make things right. 

The Grand Medicine Society in Ojibwa syllabics. Judge Sinclair combined his wisdom as a member of this traditional First Nations society and as a Judge,  Canadian Senator, and a Companion of the Order of Canada.  

LOCAL ACTION PLANS 

Over the years I have joined members of the SafeGrowth team in delivering search conferences precisely to create local visions of new approaches and to build local capacity to make them happen. This approach produces success. For example, last year SafeGrowth facilitator, Professor Tarah Hodgkinson finished a successful search conference for safety planning in Brantford, Ontario.  

I see the value of empowering those in the community by teaching skills in crime prevention, neighborhood planning, community investment, and rehabilitation. This is how you build local capacity. Diffuse government programs rarely fit the local context, as suggested by recent provincial/municipal government conflicts in Prince George.

Judge Sinclair was a member of a traditional Ojibway medicine society and his Ojibway name was Mizanay Gheezhik. That translates to "the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky”. If there was ever a time when we needed a new vision of something bigger and better – new pictures in the sky – now is the time! 

Judge Sinclair, we miss your vision.