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| 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.
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| 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. Kennedy and Johnson launched highly-regarded social programs, much 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.
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| 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? After all, 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?
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| 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. This decline was across all crime categories, it continued through George W. Bush’s tenure and into Obama's first term.
Did that crime decline stem from Clinton’s all-encompassing anti-crime campaign called the 1994 Crime Bill?
This bill was one of the largest anti-crime efforts since Johnson's 1968 Safe Streets Act. 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).
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| 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 (to be fair, 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 started declining a few years before this bill.
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| 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 |
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, 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 like 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 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!
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