By Douglas V. Gibbs
According to the numbers, under President Donald J. Trump our society is more secure and more orderly – and the media simply is not talking about it. Crime rates have fallen to “historic lows” across the United States with homicides on track to register its lowest level in at least 126 years. When compared to the year before the COVID-19 scamdemic, carjacking, robberies, homicides, aggravated assault, gun assault, vehicle thefts, sexual assault, and domestic violence are all lower in the first six months of 2026. 18 months in, despite the riotous and violent opposition against ICE and other federal officers doing their job regarding the illegal alien invasion, President Trump has restored law and order…as promised.
FBI Director Kash Patel said the United States’ crime reduction is a “direct result of the Trump administration letting good cops be cops and this FBI taking on violent crime in ways never done before…A safer America is no accident – it’s the work of the FBI and our partners every day, taking 118 percent more violent criminals off the street last year, breaking the drug trafficking and financial networks who fuel the organized crime industry, and working with the interagency more seamlessly than we ever have before.”
The data comes from the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. According to those numbers as reported by WLT Report, across 30 cities with homicide data, killings fell 18 percent during the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year. That’s 215 less murders in just six months. Homicides are down 51 percent from the first half of 2022. For violent crimes, 2 percent fewer aggravated assaults and 6 percent fewer gun assaults were reported in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year. Carjackings dropped 73 percent since 2023. Residential burglaries are down 56 percent from 2018. Motor-vehicle theft is down 51 percent from 2023. Based on 13 offenses in 36 large cities that consistently publish monthly figures, nine of those 13 offenses were lower in the first half of 2026 than they were during the same stretch of 2025. Only shoplifting has remained above its pre-pandemic 2019 level when researchers compared the broader nine-year trend, and in the short-term when compared to the first half of last year domestic violence incidents were up by 8 percent and sexual assault by 3 percent.
The homicide count fell in 21 of the 30 cities that supplied data for that offense. That said, in eight of those cities violence increased 8 percent and drug offenses rose 12 percent – revealing that some cities moved in the wrong direction. Not every neighborhood is suddenly safe, but the national trend is that we are headed in the right direction and we do tend to judge Presidents by what happens under their leadership.
The Trump administration ties these results to backing police (abandoning the defund-the-police movement that the DSA and many Democrats back), enforcing immigration law, targeting violent offenders, and refusing to treat public disorder as an unfortunate and unfixable feature of American life.
The numbers produced favorable statistics in cities where federal task forces put more agents, prosecutors, intelligence, and enforcement pressure against repeat offenders and organized criminal networks. The strategy in Memphis produced 200 less murders in Memphis last year for the first time since 2019.
This is what happens when we put law enforcement back on offense, rather than defunding police. “President Trump promised to make America safe again, and he has done just that,” Lauren Bis, assistant secretary at the DHS’s Office of Public Affairs, said in a statement. “Crime has fallen to record lows under the Trump administration…it’s no surprise that this drop in crime coincides with deportations of dangerous criminal illegal aliens. It is common sense. When you remove criminals from the country, crime rates fall.”
In the first year of the current Trump administration, almost 3 million illegal migrants left the United States. While looking at impacts from the changes in criminal justice operations and strategies, shifts in society and culture, and technological advances, two potential causes for the improved numbers stand-out: abandoning the defund-the-police strategy, and the removal of massive numbers of criminal aliens.
One thing is for sure; as the White House has indicated, the end of the crime surge seen in the past decade is “not accidental.” According to the White House, “It is the direct result of the Trump Administration’s relentless efforts to enforce the rule of law, back the police, and surge resources into communities.”
The federal government, however, can only impact these numbers through strategies authorized to the federal government by the Constitution. The work also falls upon the shoulders of state and local jurisdictions. Localism demands, after all, local participation. As long as certain cities continue to refuse to place law enforcement on a higher level in their local plans, and as long as certain states refuse to get back to using higher deterrents like longer prison sentences and the death penalty for capital crimes, their numbers will not join the trend and those places under hard-left leadership and infested with cultural rot will continue to fail to move in the same direction as the general trend.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
