Amid Trump's relentless criminality, he's desperate you don't learn this truth

Notwithstanding Donald Trump’s criminalization of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, with their avalanche of state-organized violations of the first, fourth, and tenth amendments as well as the due process rights of citizens and noncitizens alike, ordinary crime still dropped last year.

Traditional crimes against person or property have been trending downward since 2023. Financial illegalities, however, have continued to rise, in the areas of digital, white-collar, and corporate crime. We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent accumulation annually, dwarfing accumulated ordinary property crime, all the way back to the beginning of this nation.

While downward trends in “street crimes” have not yet been impacted by Trump’s federal crackdown in Democratic cities, or his unprecedented cuts to DOJ grants for community-based prevention and safety initiatives, such moves could very well have an effect.

On the other hand, Trump’s corrupt economic policies and reductions in regulatory controls result in fewer resources, investigations, and general focus on “suite crimes.” According to a recent report from TRAC, this contributes to an ongoing decline in federal prosecutions of corporate crime since the 2008 Wall Street implosion.

Like the Council on Criminal Justice, the New York Times, NPR, and other publications, the Atlantic has reported on the issue, in its case under a striking headline: “The Great Crime Decline Is Happening All Across the Country.”

“Even cities with understaffed police departments have made record gains,” the Atlantic said.

However, to most politicians, the public, and mass media, talking about crime is usually done without any regard for, let alone discussion of, crimes committed in the suites or by elites.

Rates of street crime

Let’s try to explain why street crime trends in general and against the person — such as homicide, which fell an average 21 percent in major U.S. cities last year — are going down, and why such trends are unrelated to Trump’s federal interventions in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, Ore, and Minneapolis.

Here is the data for homicides in 2025 compared to 2024, as well as for some city-specific trends for the same period:

• Los Angeles — 18 percent decline in homicide, recorded 22,022 fewer total crimes, falling to pre-COVID levels.
• Washington, DC — 40 percent decline in homicide, one of the nation’s largest drops in robberies, down by 37 percent.
• Chicago — 29 percent decline in homicide, including a 34.5 percent drop in shootings and double-digit decreases in every major crime category.
• Portland, Ore — 51 percent decline in homicide and a 43 percent drop in carjackings.
• Minneapolis — 17 percent decline in homicide, with gun violence down 18 percent.

In the context of longer trends in rising and declining rates of “criminality,” in relation to the changing nature and shifting kinds of “crime” over time, most criminologists would agree that short-term declines in “crime control” or even longer-term trends concerning crimes against the person or property, are caused by better policing, community-based services, and myriad social, political, and economic conditions.

Specifically, declines that nationally began in 2023 were due to post-pandemic normalization; increased federal funding for police and community violence intervention programs; targeted policing to remove illegal guns in high-crime areas; and a stabilizing reprieve from the social and economic stressors of 2020-21, mostly due to President Joe Biden’s economic policies that had a positive effect on labor markets, curbed job losses, and re-opened schools and restaurants.

Trump’s policies of chaos, disorder, and brutality, coupled with defunding crime- and safety related programs, prominently including civil rights oversight of criminal justice workers, mean drops in street crime could yet reverse.

But there are a host of other counter- or mediating factors. One set of such factors revolves around what criminologists have identified as “insulators” from crime. Part of social control theory, “insulation” refers to those social-psychological elements that explain why individuals conform to social norms and refrain from criminal behavior despite internal “pushes” and external “pulls” towards crime.

In the digital age, insulating factors can be robust. They can explain, for example, why community-based organizing and infrastructural development involving thousands of Minnesotans in resistance to the ICE murders and invasion of the Twin Cities, helps not only to suppress violent protests against state-organized lawlessness but also reduces the potential number of individual offenders targeting other community members.

This occurs through democratic and communal solidarity and anti-authoritarian resistance that transcends politics of identity and cultural difference. Demonstrated by Minnesotans, this kind of social-political bonding has been spreading in other Democratic cities.

More generally, when inequality is growing, whether through racial and sexual discrimination or during hard economic times, the oppressed or immiserated and semi-immiserated are more likely to identify and connect.

Media and digital communities may also serve as insulating mechanisms, helping the unprivileged find common ground, share resources, and vent grievances collectively rather than through individual criminal acts.

Above the law

All the unconstitutional behavior or enforcement illegality perpetrated by Trump — and therefore the galvanizing positive reaction to “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis — has only been experienced because the Supreme Court anointed Trump as someone “above the law.”

Had it not been for that anti-constitutional decision, Trump would not have returned to the White House. Most importantly, this hideous decision empowered the racketeer- and insurrectionist-in-chief, enabling him to neuter the Republican Congress and neutralize the “checks and balances” that are supposed to govern our federal republic.

Perhaps Trump’s two most amazing “accomplishments” are:

1. Turning the DOJ into his personal law firm and the FBI into his private investigative agency, as evidenced by the raid on a Georgia election office.
2. Breaking the law on a regular basis without any accountability at all, even when ordered hundreds of times by courts of law to cease and desist.

In sum, what is and is not a “crime” is being defined by a certifiable sociopath. But that definition cannot last forever.

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award winning books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election.