On the heels of marking the first anniversary of declaring a crime emergency in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump took his crackdown on crime on the road to New York Friday.
The president touted an historic drop in crimes, especially murder, across the country.
Trump used the David S. Mack Center for Training and Intelligence on Long Island as the backdrop for a Make America Safe Again rally championing his administration’s pro-law-and-order platform.
Prior to the rally, the White House released some statistics from the FBI on the drop in crime rate, noting violent crime is down 9.3%, adding the U.S. has seen the lowest murder rate since the bureau began tracking rates in 1936.
Murder rates are down 18.1%, rape rates down 7.6%, and robbery rates down 18.5% between 2024 and 2025.
The FBI and the White House also released “preliminary results” for 2026, showing violent crime is down 10.6%, murder down 23%, rape down 18.6%, and robbery down 19.6%.
Newly sworn-in U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche credited the drop in crime to Trump’s support for law enforcement.
“It happens when you back the blue every step of the way,” said the attorney general. “Since the beginning of President Trump’s administration, the DOJ has moved at lightening speed. We have charged 170,000 criminals in this country, and just to put that in perspective, that’s 50,000 more than the last administration did over the same time.”
Trump touted that over a million criminals have been arrested during his second term, crediting the crime crackdown to the involvement of the federal government across the country.
“Since I took office, federal law enforcement has arrested incredibly 1.2 million criminals nationwide and bad ones…We’ve increased federal criminal prosecutions by over 50%, and under the Trump administration, the FBI has nearly doubled its arrests for violent crime,” the president told the crowd of mostly uniformed law enforcement.
Trump also noted his executive order that he signed shortly after his second inauguration, which directed the U.S. attorney general to seek the death penalty for the murder of law enforcement officers, saying that in the line of duty, deaths of law enforcement officers had fallen to an 80-year low.
As part of the president’s crackdown on crime, he has deployed the National Guard to curb crime in cities such as Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans.
Since the Aug. 11, 2025, “Liberation Day” announcement in Washington, D.C. streets across the district continue to be patrolled by the National Guard, with the president saying he would like them to remain through his term, with the Department of War estimating it could cost $1.4 billion to extend the deployment through January 2029.
The crime crackdown in D.C. appears to be working, as evidenced by the numbers. The Metropolitan Police Department reports that overall crime is down 20% in the last year, with homicide rates down 32%; robbery down 16%; motor vehicle thefts down 53%; theft from auto down 36%; and total property crime down 22%.
Despite evidence showing the National Guard’s impact on D.C., blue cities, like Chicago and New York, have resisted the president’s calls to deploy troops to patrol the cities.