I BLAME HIS INFLAMMATORY RHETORIC — OH, WAIT: Violent Crime Drops, Trump Gets No Credit.

The FBI’s good news about crime got very little publicity, and I can’t find a single publication that gave the Trump administration any credit for the trend. Why should they, you might ask, since homicide and other violent crimes have been declining since the 1990s?

Because that decline was interrupted by a two-year upward spike in 2015 and 2016, the last two years of the Obama administration. The homicide rate then fell in 2017, and more steeply in 2018. Last December, as I noted here, the New York Times reported that the murder rate for 2018 was “on track for a big drop.” It gave us this useful chart, with the 2018 rate projected (the actual rate came in slightly lower). . . .

I conservatively estimated that the 2015-2016 increase in homicides under Obama cost more than 5,000 lives (most of them black). Conversely, thousands of lives are now being saved, as the homicide rate declines. You might consider this newsworthy, but our newspapers don’t. Anything that reflects negatively on the Obama administration or positively on the Trump administration–this is a twofer–is best left unmentioned. . . .

The Times doesn’t speculate about what might have caused a “broad shift in the pattern,” or why that threatened “broad shift” was reversed when Donald Trump took office. The reader is left to ponder the mystery of a “broad shift in the pattern” that coincided with the Obama administration’s campaign against law enforcement.

Weird. Well, not really.