Drew Holden: Cities Really Can Just Enforce the Law
The huge decline in violent crime isn’t a mystery.
Crime—particularly violent crime—is down dramatically over the last year. Cities like New York, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. where murders, carjacking, and theft plagued the public in the wake of COVID-19, were all found to have experienced double-digit decreases in violent crime. Experts, the legacy media, and many Democrats are scratching their heads. As a recent New York Times headline declared, “What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure.”
Other outlets and commentators have been similarly befuddled. New York Magazine dubbed it “The Mysterious Plunge in America’s Murder Rate.” Experts “said it’s too early to tell what is prompting the change,” the Associated Press intoned; the Washington Post cited a liberal expert who cautioned that there was “no silver bullet” to make sense of the data. For TIME, the drop in violent crime “can be attributed to a kaleidoscope of factors, none of which can singularly or definitively account for the decline.” CNN shrugged that “it’s nearly impossible to zero in on any one reason” for the drop. “The bottom line: Experts aren’t sure why violent crime continues to fall,” Axios reported.
Not until 21 paragraphs into the Times piece do the authors give us a hint about how it happened: experts “do not wholly discount” policing, particularly “the multipronged effort that many cities mounted against violence in the past few years, including hot-spot policing, summer jobs for youth, cognitive behavioral therapy and focused deterrence, an approach that calls for paying sustained attention to the small number of people at highest risk of committing violence.”
In other words, violent crime is in freefall across the country thanks in large part to better, more targeted policing aimed at restoring law and order. The biggest threat to our renewed ability to combat crime might be a legacy media hamstrung by the baggage of prior anti-police animus.
While stories about the decline have focused mostly on “expert” wisdom, a look at the cities hardest hit by crime reveals a pattern of more aggressive and law-and-order focused policing.
City-specific successes underscore some of the ways a focus on restoring order can improve communities.
The Democratic mayor of Memphis, Tennessee—long among the most violent places in America—welcomed a federal task force to the city in September. Federal agents provided additional capacity for local and state law enforcement to bring the necessary force to bear to combat crime. As even the New York Times admitted, “to date, the task force has made more than 6,300 arrests, conducted more than 68,000 traffic stops and recovered 1,532 firearms… crime rates, which had already been declining, have dropped even more since Oct. 1: Murder and sexual assault are down nearly 42 percent, while aggravated assault is down about 35 percent.”
Similarly, Baltimore, Maryland, saw a 50-year low in murders in 2025. City officials credit federal support, more aggressive hiring efforts, and a focus on arresting repeat violent criminal offenders as a key source of the decline. As the Washington Post reported:
The city’s data analysis showed that three-quarters of shootings in Baltimore involved fewer than 2 percent of city residents. Many of those people had extensive criminal histories… The city created programs to identify, track down and try to help that age demographic. At the same time, officials also made sure that state, local and federal law enforcement agencies investigated the groups they believed were responsible for most of Baltimore’s violence.
As Baltimore City State Attorney Ivan Bates put it more straightforwardly to Fox News, “‘that means it’s a small group of individuals in Baltimore who are robbing, shooting and killing individuals.’” Aggressive prosecution and new mandatory minimums for repeat offenders have meant that “‘they’re now removed from the community for a minimum of five years without the possibility of parole.’”
New York City took a similar approach, dubbed “precision policing,” where police resources were targeted to crime hotspots and crime data was used to identify repeat offenders. Increased police presence, conversely, was relied on to maintain law and order on subways and other public transit.
Another place where federal and local law enforcement have worked together of late is the nation’s capital. President Trump deployed the National Guard—to much local, media, and Democratic opposition—in August 2025, and federalized D.C. police who were facing serious allegations of cooking the books and otherwise failing to take action against crime. Sensationalist coverage at the time warned the move would only make the problem worse, and outlets and commentators tried to claim vindication when two guardsmen were shot in November.
But the crime data shows just the opposite. A CBS News analysis found that three weeks later, “violent crime is down in Washington by almost half when compared to the same 19 days in 2024. The analysis…also shows violent crime is down in comparison to the five-year average for the same dates. Beyond violent crime, reported burglaries also are down 48% and car thefts have fallen 36%.” On the decline in crime since, D.C.’s police chief credits the surge in federal support.
But D.C.’s shift predates the National Guard’s arrival and goes beyond violent crime. As in New York, crime on D.C.’s Metro transit bus and subway system had been a longstanding public concern. Starting in 2023, the capital upped the number of police on Metro, and in 2024, started cracking down on fare evasion—despite activist concerns that doing so was “a tool deployed in the ongoing war against the Black working class.” D.C. added new gates that were harder to hop over, and started giving out tickets for doing so. The move quickly made the Metro system safer and more orderly, cutting fare avoidance by 70%.
It shouldn’t be “mysterious” that failing to enforce the law drives up crime. This was the chief lesson of the crime wave of the 1970s: tolerance of and complacency surrounding crime allows it to fester and grow. Whatever one thinks of the tough-on-crime approach in the 1990s, increased policing and enforcement cratered the violent crime that had been plaguing cities, then as now.
So why isn’t America jumping for joy in unison? Why has the news flown under the radar?
The usual political dynamics explain part of it. Trump—as ever—rushed to claim credit for the good news. Media voices and Democrats leapt to dispute this assertion, crediting the Biden administration’s investment in community programs. But this squabble over credit risks missing the most vital lesson: Better approaches to law and order—anchored by aggressive enforcement, targeting of habitual offenders, and a roll back of anti-police policies—helped drastically reduce violent crime. Ignoring that is a danger to public safety.
Yes, there are factors beyond the police—some, like an aging population, are mere matters of demographics; others, like increases in surveillance and obesity, should give us pause. And there’s more data to be released, like the FBI’s national crime data, and the encouraging data to date doesn’t allow for the kind of causal testing that could offer an irrefutable conclusion.
But there’s another factor that could be preventing a richer understanding of what went right: the methods that have helped drive down violent crime run contrary to years of advocacy from elected Democrats, liberal activists, and the same media tasked with reporting the good news about how the police can benefit public safety.
The anti-police phenomenon of 2020, amid a broader rethink on race and social justice, ushered in an enormous spike in crime. As Charles Fain Lehman wrote last June in the Free Press:
It’s not hard to understand how homicide became so bad. Five years ago, the murder of George Floyd instigated one of the largest protest movements in American history. Local, state, and federal leaders either endorsed “defund the police” or, more often, acknowledged its advocates had some good points. Concurrently, police activity and staffing fell in big cities (where most of the crime is), as demoralized cops left the force. In many jurisdictions, new policies—from chokehold bans to “no-chase” policies—further constrained police activity.
Unsurprisingly, murder soared. The homicide rate rose 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase since 1960. It rose again slightly in 2021, peaking at its highest level since 1997.
That the same outlets and elected leaders who offered their support for these dangerous ideas then aren’t inclined to explain the benefits of their reversal now shouldn’t surprise us.
Likewise, some of this resistance surely stems from a refusal to credit Trump or appear to validate his framing of public safety. Ever since his description of “American carnage,” the press have been engaged in a tug-of-war with the president over the state of American cities. That crime could fall so noticeably makes clear that there was something to his description.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration is another development that shouldn’t be discounted. Regardless of what one thinks about the administration’s full-court press on deportations, even by the media’s own math, tens of thousands of violent criminals have departed from the United States in the last year. That, added to a reduction in crime due to an all-but-closed Southern border and efforts to curb cartels and criminal gangs, are likely driving down broader crime numbers.
Crime is always a high priority for voters, so it stands to reason that the two political parties would tussle over credit when it comes down. But improving public safety requires an honest look at the facts absent the political posturing. Doing so doesn’t demand police bootlicking, or a belief that police behavior and tactics are without blemish. But one doesn’t need a “Thin Blue Line” bumper sticker to recognize that law enforcement is a critical element in, well, enforcing the law.
Public hostility in 2020 toward the police—married to an increase in officer retirements—likely forced departments to get more creative in how officers were deployed. But recent developments should make one thing clear: police, smartly deployed, are vital to keeping communities safe. That such an observation was ever in doubt helped usher in a spike in violent crime, and should be given a first class, bipartisan delivery to the dustbin of history.