Under Trump, the murder rate skyrocketed. Biden had an answer.

Opinion by Patrick Sharkey on September 13, 2024.

Government actions in the areas of law enforcement, community roles and gun control helped curb the rise in murder rates.

When President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021, it was shortly after the largest single-year increase in the murder rate ever. The national murder rate rose about 30 percent in 2020, the last year of the Trump administration. Nearly 5,000 more Americans were killed that year than the year before, and the number of fatal shootings had nearly doubled in cities like Milwaukee, New York, and Fresno, California.

Fast forward nearly four years. Unless something drastic changes in the next few months, Biden will leave office on the heels of the largest single-year drop in the murder rate ever. While former President Trump claimed at Tuesday's debate with Vice President Harris that “crime in this country is through the roof,” data from AmericanViolence.org, a website I set up as part of the Violence and Inequality Project at Princeton, shows the opposite: Gun violence continues to decline rapidly in a large majority of U.S. cities. Fatal shootings have fallen by more than 40 percent in Philadelphia through August of this year, and by nearly half in New Orleans.

Data collected by crime analyst Jeff Asher suggests the national murder rate will fall by about 16 percent in 2024, the largest drop since reliable statistics began in 1960. If it continues at this pace, at least 5,000 fewer Americans will be murdered this year than in 2020, Trump's final year in office. That would make 2024 one of the safest years in U.S. history.

It is usually a mistake to attribute the rise in violence to the incumbent presidential administration, or even to the actions of the federal government. Gun laws and prison policies are enacted almost exclusively at the state level, and policing is even more decentralized. And yet there are good reasons to believe that the abrupt rise in violence in the last year of the Trump administration and the decline in violence under Biden were no coincidence.

Trump's policies during his time in office were often incoherent, but most actions shared a common goal: undermining the role and effectiveness of government. He relaxed federal gun laws, and under his leadership the Justice Department largely limited its investigations into discriminatory practices at local police departments.

Trump's indifferent style of politics had tangible consequences in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic hit the United States and the rest of the world. No presidential administration could have fully prepared for it or stopped its spread. But the United States was the only country where the pandemic led to a sharp increase in gun violence.

Trump's denial of the reality the nation faced, his efforts to undermine any collective response, and the incompetence of his administration sent a very clear message to the nation: We were all on our own. Americans bought more new guns in 2020 than in any previous year.

In late May 2020, when the video of George Floyd's killing sparked a nationwide uprising, shootings immediately increased in nearly every major U.S. city. In some relatively safe cities like Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, the magnitude of the sudden rise in gun violence was truly terrifying. And yet it was predictable. There are now numerous examples of police brutality leading to violent anti-police protests followed by a rise in violence. This pattern may be due to changes in police and resident behavior, such as an unwillingness to give police information or call the police to report a crime.

When a city relies on a single institution—law enforcement—to address all of the challenges posed by extreme inequality, and that institution suddenly recedes from its role, local social order is disrupted. When firearms circulate freely in neighborhoods across the country, it can lead to a sudden spike in shootings. The Trump administration was not directly the cause of the spike in gun violence in the summer of 2020, but the former president's approach to governing helped create the conditions for the rise in violence. His words fanned the flames of racial animosity, and his actions were symbolic, such as sending funds and federal officers to Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

When Trump left office, the country was in chaos and had the highest murder rate of the 21st century. But when Biden took office in January 2021, things did not immediately improve. The murder rate worsened in 2021, and there were no immediate signs of a return to the relative peace of the Obama years.

The policy shift began with the passage of the American Rescue Plan. Federal funding enabled cities and towns to avoid budget cuts and cuts to city services and personnel. Biden resisted calls to defund law enforcement, and the administration embraced fundamental policing reforms while investing billions of dollars to retain police officers and hire new ones. This support was critical to ensuring that police departments did not have to deal with a decimated force with unusually high rates of violence. Strong evidence from the 1990s and the Great Recession of the late 2000s shows us that this type of influx of federal funding to states, local governments, and police departments leads to significant reductions in violent crime.

Stabilizing local governments and police was the first core component of Biden's anti-violence model, but his approach also had a new, independent dimension. The American Rescue Plan was the first major federal law in more than 50 years to recognize the role of community organizations in keeping neighborhoods safe without requiring them to rely solely on the police.

The law explicitly provides funding for community violence intervention. This represents a significant departure from previous federal policy and is based on solid evidence: the best available research shows that community organizations can have a powerful impact on violence and that the proliferation of local nonprofits in the 1990s played a central, if underappreciated, role in the reduction in violence that occurred soon after in many American cities.

The third component of the administration's new model was re-involving the federal government in gun regulation. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was the first major federal gun law in nearly 30 years. The law included new anti-gun trafficking measures, stricter regulations on gun dealers, and stricter rules on gun purchases by Americans under 21. The administration announced it would go further, establishing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, led by Ms. Harris, and proposing measures such as near-universal background checks that have been implemented at the state level and proven effective in reducing firearm deaths.

The Biden-Harris model for addressing violence has its weaknesses and is incomplete. Little meaningful progress has been made in reducing concentrated poverty that contributes to violence. The administration has called for but not implemented many of the basic gun laws based on the strongest evidence. Federal funding for community violence interventions has been historic, but it has been a drop in the bucket compared to the funding police units received from the pandemic relief bill. And efforts to fundamentally reform the institution of law enforcement are incomplete at best. Although the administration supported significant reforms in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, the bill failed to make it through the Senate. The number of Americans killed by police departments each year has increased, not decreased, since Biden took office.

These shortcomings are the result of a number of political constraints and calculations that lie far outside my area of ​​expertise. But looking back over the last four years, the conclusions are clear. The federal government can help solve some of our big challenges. Investments in public facilities and community organizations can save thousands of lives. Social policy can transform our nation's cities.

It's difficult to predict what will happen over the next four years under President Harris or President Trump. But we can say this: All available evidence suggests that a federal approach characterized by deregulation of gun laws and disinvestment in communities is likely to lead to more violence. An approach characterized by investment in new approaches to law enforcement and strong support for community organizations, funding for state and local governments, and increased efforts to keep guns out of American neighborhoods is likely the most effective way for the federal government to curb violence even further.

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This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

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