The New York Times is a wonderfully reliable mouthpiece for the interests of criminals, drug pushers in particular, and it does not disappoint in yesterday's editorial. What it adds, however, are two point-blank lies early in the piece designed to smear Donald Trump.
This is the editorial's first sentence: "In the decade or so before Donald Trump became president, America's approach to criminal justice was changing fast -- reckoning with decades of destructive and ineffective policies that had ballooned the prison population and destroyed countless lives."
The proposition that our criminal justice policies were "ineffective" is not merely breathtakingly false but upside down. Over roughly the last three decades, starting in the term of President George H. W. Bush, crime rates fell by half. These policies, in particular more police, more aggressive policing, determinate sentencing systems, and increased use of incarceration, have to count by any sane reckoning as one of the biggest success stories of the post-WW II era. And they did not destroy lives; they saved lives, by the thousands.
The Times quickly moves on with this: "Within minutes of taking office, Mr. Trump turned back the dial, warning darkly in his Inaugural Address of 'American carnage,' of cities and towns gutted by crime -- even though crime rates are at their lowest in decades."
Good grief. Crime rates are not "at their lowest in decades." In the two years before Trump took the oath in January 2017, violent crime had skyrocketed from what it was just in 2014. Murder increased by more than 20% nationwide in 2015 and 2016. Indeed, in those two years alone, we gave back all the gains we had made against violent crime since 2010. The Times can read the same statistics anyone can find in less than thirty seconds -- and it very likely did, and simply chose to lie about them.
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