“A few years out from the start of the pandemic, it does appear that the rise in homicides in the United States was unique. According to multiple studies and a systematic review of crime data for 2020, in most countries crime fell following Covid-19 lockdowns, then gradually returned to their pre-pandemic levels once the lockdown measures lifted. Homicide was the exception to the rule — but not the way it was in the United States.
Homicides around the world, according to the 46 studies the authors reviewed, didn’t change significantly due to the pandemic. “Most studies reported no relationship between Covid-19 and homicides,” the authors of the study wrote. A majority of the studies, they noted, found no relationship between the implementation or easing of lockdown measures and killings.
The Small Arms Survey, which gathers and analyzes data about firearms ownership and violence across the world, also found that the global rate of violent deaths decreased worldwide in 2020.
What was different in the United States?
“There was no other country that experienced this kind of sudden increase in gun violence,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies the intersections of urban segregation, economic inequality, and violence. It was gun violence, specifically, that sent violent crime soaring. Americans bought guns in record numbers during the pandemic, and according to an analysis by Rob Arthur and Asher for Vox, there’s evidence that more people were carrying guns in 2020 — even before crime soared that summer. “Guns don’t necessarily create violence on their own, but they make violence more lethal,” Sharkey says.
While experts caution that it’s difficult to definitively prove what caused the rise in violent crime, there are a few other factors that likely contributed to it.
One was the killing of George Floyd by police and the unrest surrounding it, accompanied by a withdrawal in policing that followed. Previous research has shown that high-profile incidents of police violence correspond with a pullback by police and a rise in crime — specifically, robberies and murders. Data following the unrest after Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and elsewhere shows a marked decline in policing and arrests that summer.”
“Democrats didn’t convict Trump; a jury of 12 ordinary Americans did. The Biden administration played no role in prosecuting the case; the indictment came from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and was issued after federal prosecutors declined to go after Trump on similar charges.”
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“The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.”
“Broadly speaking, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion reaches three conclusions. The first is that when the president takes any action under the authority given to him by the Constitution itself, his authority is “conclusive and preclusive” and thus he cannot be prosecuted. Thus, for example, a president could not be prosecuted for pardoning someone, because the Constitution explicitly gives the chief executive the “Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”
One question that has loomed over this case for months is whether presidential immunity is so broad that the president could order the military to assassinate a political rival. While this case was before a lower court, one judge asked if Trump could be prosecuted if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and Trump’s lawyer answered that he could not unless Trump had previously been successfully impeached and convicted for doing so.
Roberts’s opinion in Trump, however, seems to go even further than Trump’s lawyer did. The Constitution, after all, states that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So, if presidential authority is “conclusive and preclusive” when presidents exercise their constitutionally granted powers, the Court appears to have ruled that yes, Trump could order the military to assassinate one of his political opponents. And nothing can be done to him for it.”
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“Roberts’s second conclusion is that presidents also enjoy “at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.” Thus, if a president’s action even touches on his official authority (the “outer perimeter” of that authority), then the president enjoys a strong presumption of immunity from prosecution.
This second form of immunity applies when the president uses authority that is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, and it is quite broad — most likely extending even to mere conversations between the president and one of his subordinates.
The Court also says that this second form of immunity is exceptionally strong. As Roberts writes, “the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’”
Much of Roberts’s opinion, moreover, details just how broad this immunity will be in practice. Roberts claims, for example, that Trump is immune from prosecution for conversations between himself and high-ranking Justice Department officials, where he allegedly urged them to pressure states to “replace their legitimate electors” with fraudulent members of the Electoral College who would vote to install Trump for a second term.
Roberts writes that “the Executive Branch has ‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute,” and thus Trump’s conversations with Justice Department officials fall within his “conclusive and preclusive authority.” Following that logic, Trump could not have been charged with a crime if he had ordered the Justice Department to arrest every Democrat who holds elective office.
Elsewhere in his opinion, moreover, Roberts suggests that any conversation between Trump and one of his advisers or subordinates could not be the basis for a prosecution. In explaining why Trump’s attempts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to “fraudulently alter the election results” likely cannot be prosecuted, for example, Roberts points to the fact that the vice president frequently serves “as one of the President’s closest advisers.”
Finally, Roberts does concede that the president may be prosecuted for “unofficial” acts. So, for example, if Trump had personally attempted to shoot and kill then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election, rather than ordering a subordinate to do so, then Trump could probably be prosecuted for murder.
But even this caveat to Roberts’s sweeping immunity decision is not very strong. Roberts writes that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” And Roberts even limits the ability of prosecutors to pursue a president who accepts a bribe in return for committing an official act, such as pardoning a criminal who pays off the president. In Roberts’s words, a prosecutor may not “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself.”
That means that, while the president can be prosecuted for an “unofficial” act, the prosecutors may not prove that he committed this crime using evidence drawn from the president’s “official” actions.
The practical implications of this ruling are astounding. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in a dissenting opinion, “imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so,” it follows from Roberts’s opinion that the ensuing murder indictment “could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support” the proposition that the president intended to commit murder.
Monday’s decision, in other words, ensures that, should Trump return to power, he will do so with hardly any legal checks. Under the Republican justices’ decision in Trump, a future president can almost certainly order the assassination of his rivals. He can wield the authority of the presidency to commit countless crimes. And he can order a subordinate to do virtually anything.
“In the first decade of the 2000s, the U.S. attorney for D.C. prosecuted more than 70 percent of arrests. In 2016 the percentage began to slide downward, falling below 50 percent in 2021 (Graves took the job that year) and hitting 33 percent in 2022. After some attention was drawn to the decline, the number recovered a bit to a still-low 44 percent in 2023. Felony prosecutions fell from more than 80 percent to about 50 percent in 2022, then rose to 60 percent in 2023. The U.S. attorney declined to prosecute 58 percent of all arrests for theft in 2021 and 2022, which as Joe Friday said “undermined the certainty of punishment for theft in DC.”
Precisely why the prosecution rate has been falling is less clear. Graves has variously claimed that the statistic is unimportant, blamed the crime lab or the MPD, noted that victims do not always press charges, or referenced tough case law or defendant-friendly D.C. juries and judges. But Graves usually offers no explanation at all, even in brazen cases. For example, a man arrested after exposing himself to 24 preschoolers on a public street and bloodily assaulting their two teachers had been arrested three weeks earlier for indecent exposure, two months before that for punching a restaurant employee, the year before that for trespassing, and in 2018 for attempted murder. The system keeps freeing him. Graves has yet to explain why.
But just as the drop in prosecution rate coincided with the rise in crime, the stepped-up prosecution rate after mid-2023 did coincide with the decline in crime. Increased or decreased likelihood of being charged has an impact. David Muhammad of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform said lack of consequences came up “over and over again” in interviews and “needs to be taken seriously.””
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“Now consider the city crime lab. In April 2021, it lost its accreditation and stopped processing evidence for prosecutions. It has yet to fully regain it.
The loss of accreditation came after years of endemic problems, including faulty results, prosecutors interfering with test results, and firings of whistleblowers. The Bowser administration promised to promptly pursue reaccreditation, but it then got bogged down in a dispute with the D.C. Council about whether the lab should be part of the MPD (Bowser’s view) or not (the council’s). That matter was not resolved until June 2023—the peak of the crime surge—and the lab finally regained its biology and chemistry accreditations in December. Firearms accreditation remains in work.
During this entire period, processing of evidence for the MPD and the U.S. attorney has had to be outsourced to other labs, public and private. Many of these labs had little spare capacity, so the result has been backlogs, and probably dropped prosecutions. As of April 2023 770 DNA samples from violent crime cases sat in a backlog. Fingerprint “hits,” one measure of testing, fell from 1,828 in 2020 to 601 in 2022. The number of rape kits tested within three months dropped from 98 percent to 81 percent.
The 2023 crime wave arguably ended the political dysfunction that held up the crime lab’s reaccreditation. But the lack of a functioning crime lab likely contributed to the sense that you could get away with crimes. Prosecutions are hard, after all, without evidence.
Then there’s the MPD. Bowser has attributed some of the crime wave to the long-term drop in MPD staffing, which fell from 4,010 sworn officers in 2013 under her predecessor to 3,337 in 2023. But again, the most considerable drop (in 2021, from 3,799 to 3,580) predated the spike in crime. To identify the more important problems at the MPD, look at what changed for the better when Smith took over.
When Smith took the job in June 2023, the crime spike was already apparent. Word quickly spread through the force that the new chief wanted to see changes. Area commanders were expected to do weekly walks in the community with residents, patrols would be proactive rather than just waiting in cars for a call, and greater efforts would be made to deter repeat offenders. Smith unveiled a Real-Time Crime Center connecting D.C.’s myriad federal police forces with hers. Arrests per officer nudged upward after halving in 2020.
These perhaps feel like obvious actions for a city police force, especially one in the middle of a crime wave. But they were not happening before June.
One lingering issue may be one of the hardest to tackle: The best officers with the most seniority can choose to stay in the “easiest” parts of the city (Wards 1 and 3), leaving the greenest or least proactive officers to get sent to where crime is heaviest (Wards 7 and 8). This leads to skills mismatch and a community sense of being neglected.”
“two other polls found that the verdict has made a small but significant share of potential Trump supporters less likely to vote for him. According to Ipsos/Reuters, 10 percent of Republican registered voters said they were less likely to support Trump after the conviction; HarrisX/Forbes put that number at 11 percent. Similarly, 25 percent of independents said they were less likely to vote for Trump in the Ipsos/Reuters poll, and 28 percent of independents said so in the HarrisX/Forbes poll.”
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“you should take more-or-less-likely polls with a grain of salt; some of those people who say they are less likely to vote for Trump may not have been very likely to vote for him in the first place, and even among supporters, “less likely to vote for” does not mean “definitely will not vote for.””
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“On average, the most recent national polls from the four pollsters who’ve polled since the verdict show a tied race.* That represents a 1-point average swing toward Biden from those pollsters’ pre-conviction surveys.”
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“Interestingly, at least according to these surveys, the shift toward Biden isn’t because Trump is losing support; it’s because Biden is gaining it. On average, Biden’s support went from 42 percent in these four pollsters’ pre-conviction polls to 43 percent after it. By contrast, Trump’s support stayed flat at 43 percent.”
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“Although the fact that three out of the four pollsters showed a shift toward Biden makes us more confident that this is, in fact, real movement, the shifts in both the Ipsos/Reuters and Morning Consult polls were within the margin of error — meaning they could have just been due to random chance. That said, Echelon Insights did something useful: It surveyed the same voters both before and after the conviction, removing the possibility that its 2-point shift toward Biden was due to getting a slightly more Democratic sample the second time around.
It’s also possible that these shifts are an illusion caused by something called (deep breath) differential partisan nonresponse bias. Basically, in the wake of bad news for Republicans and/or good news for Democrats, Republicans may be less excited about responding to surveys and Democrats may be more excited to — which can lead to polling numbers that are a bit better for Democrats than the true state of public opinion.”
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“Even if Biden’s improvement is real, though, another thing to bear in mind is that these are just four polls.”
“”Our key finding was that Black Americans preferred to maintain (or increase) police patrol and spending, and that this preference was not conditional on the described crime rates or policing reforms,” write Linda Balcarová and Justin Pickett of the University at Albany, SUNY; Amanda Graham and Sean Patrick Roche of Texas State University; and Francis T. Cullen of the University of Cincinnati. “Most Black Americans reported that even if crime rates fell and even if there were no new policing reforms, they still wanted to maintain or increase police patrol and spending.””
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“It is well-established that black people are disproportionately afraid of cops, particularly in comparison to their white counterparts. Black Americans are reportedly more than five times as likely than white people to fear excessive force from police. What’s more, a study by three of the same researchers—Pickett, Graham, and Cullen—found that 42 percent of black respondents were “very afraid” police would kill them sometime within the next five years. Only 11 percent of white respondents feared the same thing.
But in their more recent study, they found that such fear coexists, however counterintuitively, with that strong desire to keep or increase police presence and funding. According to their data, 81 percent of black Americans who say they are afraid or very afraid of cops want to maintain or increase police spending”
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“Just as the data make clear that black Americans are more likely to fear police, it is also plainly true that black people are disproportionately the victims of violence. It follows, then, that the people most impacted by crime are going to have strong feelings about abating it however possible. And while police are not always adept at solving crime—in 2022, for example, police cleared about 37 percent of violent offenses reported to them—their presence does have a deterrent effect on criminal activity, which also comports with basic common sense.”
“In the roughly week and a half since former president (and presumptive Republican presidential nominee) Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies related to falsifying records to hide hush-money payments to a porn star, numerous national polls have indicated that voters have moved slightly toward incumbent president (and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee) Joe Biden.
A HarrisX/Forbes poll found Biden and Trump each getting a one-point bump after the verdict. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found a one-point bump for Biden, with Trump losing a point. A Morning Consult poll found a one-point bump for Biden, with Trump neither gaining nor losing any ground. And an Echelon Insights poll found a two-point Biden bump, with Trump support staying flat. (All poll results can be found in a chart here.)”
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“”The verdict has not overhauled the 2024 race nearly as much as Democrats hoped it would,” writes The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “But the totality of the evidence suggests it has dinged Trump a little.””
“Some undocumented immigrants have committed atrocious crimes, but there are many reasons to doubt that recent incidents prove America is suffering a surging migrant crime wave.
Crime is actually down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing operations. “Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles,” NBC reported.
“We don’t have real-time data, but the partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities,” concurs David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “The most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
This aligns with historic trends. In 2015, the Migration Policy Institute found that undocumented immigrants have a lower rate of felony convictions than the overall U.S. population does. Criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin, going off of “more than two decades of research on immigration and crime,” concluded that “communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide,” wrote The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at Cato, found that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate in Texas than native-born Americans do. “Few people are murderers, and illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to be murderers,” wrote Nowrasteh. “We should understand that more enforcement of immigration laws will not reduce homicide rates.””
“It is absolutely true that the right to self-defense is vital. And to argue that Perry—who, prior to killing Foster at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, wrote that he wanted to “shoot the [protesters] in the front and push the pedal to the metal”—acted in self-defense is to make a total mockery of that right and those who’ve had to exercise it.”
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“In July 2020, Perry ran a red light and drove into a crowd of protesters. That in and of itself, of course, is not enough to deduce that he was looking for a fight. His own statements prior to doing so, however, add a great deal of helpful context and show his frame of mind at the time. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” he wrote on social media on May 31, 2020. Also in May, he threatened to a friend that he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” And then in mid-June, he sent that message about going to a protest, “shoot[ing] the ones in the front,” and then careening his car through the hubbub.
This was part of a pattern. Austin police detective William Bursley testified, for instance, that Perry searched on Safari for “protesters in Seattle gets shot,” “riot shootouts,” and “protests in Dallas live.” It is not hard to connect the dots between his searches and messages.
So what about that stand-your-ground defense Abbott alleges the jury nullified? Core to Perry’s case and trial was whether he reasonably feared for his life that July evening. Foster indeed had a rifle on him—because open carry is legal in Texas. The Second Amendment does not solely exist for people with conservative views. The big question then: Was Foster pointing the gun at Perry when he approached his vehicle? For the answer, we can go to Perry himself, who told law enforcement that he was not. “I believe he was going to aim at me,” he said. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” But that is not a self-defense justification, as Perry cannot claim clairvoyance.
That the jury reached the conclusion they did is not a mystery, nor is it an outrage. What is outrageous, however, is that a governor who claims to care about law and order has made clear that his support for crime victims is at least in part conditional on having the “right” politics.”