(PresidentialWire.com)- Former President Donald Trump has a simple solution to the surging crime rates across the country: “Give police back their authority.”
Trump spoke with Lawrence Jones of Fox News at Sunday’s Conservative Political Action Conference. The segment aired during Monday’s Fox & Friends show.
At one point, Jones asked Trump what he’d do to “address the skyrocketing crime that’s going on.”
Trump first took shots at liberals running three prominent cities that are experiencing extremely high rates of crime increase — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Then, he said the simple answer to the question is to “give the police back their authority.”
He even said that some of the crime rates in these huge cities are akin to the violence that’s taking place in Afghanistan. He said:
“What’s terrible is in Chicago you have 200 — think of it — 260 people were shot last year, 260 people. In Afghanistan, you don’t have 260 people shot. In fact, by the way, in the last year in Afghanistan, we didn’t lose one soldier.
“But, we didn’t have a person shot. We didn’t have one soldier killed in Afghanistan for over a year.”
Trump made the comparison between Afghanistan and Chicago while he was president, too, so this is nothing new for him. The city is run by ultra-liberal Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who has taken a lot of heat for how she’s very unevenly run Chicago over the last few years.
The Chicago Tribune reported that over just the Fourth of July weekend, there were at least 108 people who were shot in the city. That’s a truly astonishing number, and it’s no wonder why Trump and other conservatives have attacked these Democrat-led cities that seem to be doing nothing tangible to put an end to it.
Trump’s solution was quite simple:
“You have to give the police back their authority. You know, the police can stop this.”
While Democrats including Lightfoot have called to “defund the police,” Trump has led the charge to do exactly the opposite. He has often called for tighter control over cities and areas of crime. And his stance seems like it might be worth trying for some of these cities.
According to the FBI’s preliminary data, the U.S. murder rate increased to 6.2 per 100,000 people in 2020. In 2019, that number was at 5 per 100,000 people. That’s a significant jump in just one year.
Liberals have tried to say that the 2020 number is still considerably lower than the rate of 10 that it reached back in 1991. They say violent crime rates are much lower than they were over many recent decades.
However, saying things are better than decades ago is a weak cop out. The fact is that violent crimes are increasing at dramatic rates in major and minor cities throughout the country.
And in many of these cities that are led by Democrats, nothing is being done about it.
