Jeff Asher thinks that 2026 is on track to have America’s lowest homicide rate on record after multiple years of striking declines spanning the Biden and Trump administrations. That’s an amazing and under-remarked trend, especially given how much attention was paid to the sharp rise in crime that happened in 2020 and 2021.
But what does it mean?
I think it is broadly clear that the spike was a reaction to the George Floyd protests and that the subsequent decline reflects a return to more vigorous levels of police activity.
Jerusalem Demsas is more skeptical, suggesting that the breadth and extent of the crime drop is too big to have a simple policy explanation.
We also disagree to an extent on how to characterize the dynamic I’m talking about. If the police reduce their activity levels in response to widespread public protests and crime goes up as a result, is that the fault of the protesters or the cops? In her view, this is a kind of wildcat strike to undermine democratic control of law enforcement. In my view, it’s mostly a more banal management problem: The mostly liberal people who live in liberal cities are not clamoring to go work as police officers, leaving mayors to supervise a group of personnel whose work is indispensable and who are very hard to replace.
But we’re in agreement that there was something perverse about the coalition dynamics that channeled outrage at police misconduct into funding cuts (which are congenial to the more progressive civilian public-sector unions) rather than into collective bargaining issues (which are not). And we try to consider ideas to increase and diversify the flows of human capital into policing, which might make all of these questions easier to deal with.
All that and much more on this week’s episode of The Argument.
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