Heather Mac Donald Can Trump Make America Safe Again? The new administration should return federal law enforcement agencies to their original missions.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-administration-america-safety-law-enforcement
Upon being nominated in 2021 to head Joe Biden’s Justice Department, Merrick Garland announced that the DOJ’s top priorities would be “ensuring racial equity” and “meeting the evolving threat of violent extremism.”
The U.S. had just lived through race riots, mass looting, and the largest annual homicide increase in the country’s history. Americans were getting robbed at gunpoint while eating in restaurants; thieves were smashing trucks and SUVs into storefronts to make off with merchandise, cash registers, and ATMs.
But when Garland and his boss referred to violent extremism, they were referring to white supremacists. “The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy,” President Joe Biden said at Howard University’s commencement in May 2023, “and I’m not saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say it wherever I go.”
He wasn’t kidding. “Our own intelligence agencies in the United States of America have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today,” Biden said in September 2022 at a White House Summit on combating hate. The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies regularly issued alerts about looming outbreaks of white supremacist violence. Those outbreaks never materialized, including those predicted for Election Day 2024.
Fighting largely phantom white supremacy was just one of the Biden administration’s obsessions that diverted it from the core duty of government: maintaining law and order. The Trump administration should reverse all identity-based policies from the Biden era and refocus federal law enforcement agencies on combating crime and illegal immigration. Doing so will guarantee an improvement in public safety.
The Biden administration made race and ethnicity the key factor in crucial criminal justice positions. By March 2022, 48 percent of Biden’s picks for U.S. attorney positions were black, though only 13 percent of the U.S. population is black.
This disparity would be worrisome enough in its own right: turning any irrelevant characteristic into a selection criterion guarantees an inferior pool of candidates. But given the academic skills gap, such a large racial preference means an even larger sacrifice of meritocratic standards. Twenty-two percent of black law graduates never pass the bar exam after five tries, for example, compared with 3 percent of white test takers. State bar associations are lowering pass scores on bar examinations in the hope of qualifying more black attorneys. Black LSAT scores and law school class rankings are at the bottom of distribution curve.
Two-thirds of Biden’s judicial nominees were “persons of color.” Biden placed more black females on the U.S. Courts of Appeal than all previous presidents combined.
Federal prosecutors make complex judgments of law and policy in deciding which cases to bring and how to defend the government. The caliber of the judiciary is even more important than that of U.S. attorneys. Judges articulate our fundamental governing principles; private parties rely on the clarity of judicial opinions to distribute risk in commercial transactions. If judges reason incoherently, the intellectual framework for public and private life breaks down.
The Biden DOJ made policy on the basis of race and ethnicity. It doled out grants to localities willing to end “elements of the justice system that foster harmful disparate impacts on people of color and other historically disadvantaged communities.” But any colorblind, constitutional law enforcement will have a disparate impact on black criminals because the black crime rate is so disproportional. In 2023, for example, blacks made up 65.6 percent of shooting suspects in New York City, and 62.5 percent of robbery suspects, though blacks are only 20 percent of the city’s population. A black New Yorker in 2023 was over 46 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker. (That black proportion of violent crime is actually down from previous years, thanks to the influx of illegal Hispanic gang members into the city during the Biden migrant crisis.)
In light of such disparities, avoiding disparate impact in criminal justice outcomes requires cutting back on prosecution—or not prosecuting at all. U.S. attorneys undoubtedly got the message. It is depolicing and deprosecution, however, that create “harmful disparate impacts on people of color” by failing to get criminals off the streets. But avoiding harm to black victims is not a top priority of racial justice activists.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, in conjunction with the Education Department, attributed disparate rates of school discipline to biased behavior on the part of teachers and principals. The division browbeat school districts into dismantling penalties for insubordination and misbehavior wherever black students were more frequently suspended. The possibility that black students actually were more disruptive was disregarded. Data on juvenile crime attest to wildly differing rates of antisocial behavior, however—black juveniles are 100 times as likely to be shot as white juveniles; their assailants are other blacks. High rates of single-parent, chaotic households predict just such a breakdown in socialization.
Students who don’t get disciplined thanks to race-based prohibitions carry that license for misbehavior into the streets; they, not disciplined students, populate the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.
The Biden Justice Department used the same disparate-impact standard to investigate police departments, with an eye toward forcing them into the costly oversight agreements known as consent decrees. Though the Biden administration finalized a consent decree in only two of its 12 law enforcement agency investigations, the ever-present threat of being investigated for biased policing, defined by disparate outcomes, gave power to local activists and the anti-police press.
Biden’s Justice Department distributed tax revenues on the basis of race and ethnicity. Applicants who identified as a “culturally specific organization”—meaning, an organization that serves any group other than white people—got priority for grants, as did applicants promising to employ members of “communities that have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by inequality.”
Making the employment of “historically underserved and marginalized” individuals a grant criterion guarantees inefficiencies in operations. The federal government should not even be in the business of using such politically loaded, academically derived terms as “marginalized.”
Pam Bondi, the likely next attorney general, comes from a solid prosecutorial background. She has worked for victims regardless of those victims’ race and ethnicity and regardless of the race and ethnicity of their assailants. President-elect Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has expressed an equal commitment to bread-and-butter crime fighting, promising to send the thousands of employees in the FBI’s Washington, D.C. headquarters to “chase down criminals” across the country.
Bondi and Patel should expunge from Justice Department policies all references to race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and gender identity. The Justice Department should not privilege some Americans because they come from alleged victim groups favored on college campuses. No federal grant, no federal job, and no federal judgeship should be given based on race or other “identity” characteristics. The disparate impact test for illegal discrimination should be extirpated from all regulations that can be changed by executive action. Only evidence of actual, intentional discrimination should trigger a Justice Department civil rights investigation.
Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, reined in the DOJ’s civil rights investigations of law enforcement agencies. He limited consent decrees to three years and required clear proof of local incompetence and bias before putting a local agency under federal government control. The new attorney general should reinstate Sessions’s policy on consent decrees.
U.S. Attorney’s offices should be commanded to make public safety their top priority. It is true that fighting street crime is primarily a local responsibility, but federal prosecutors and federal law enforcement agents can provide vital backup. Federal agents should join task forces with local police to crack down on the main players in drive-by shooting feuds. Federal prosecutions tend to move faster than local trials, providing more deterrence, and federal sentences for gun crimes tend to be longer than state sentences.
Trump appointees should throw out federal policies on school discipline. Teachers should be allowed to restore order to their classrooms so that students who want to learn can, and so that the next potential generation of violent street criminals learn that misbehavior carries consequences.
Homicides are dropping in many cities since their post-George Floyd race-riot high, but disorder, plundered stores, and the sense of threat in downtown areas are still up. Homelessness rose 18 percent in 2024, after a 12 percent increase in 2023. That increase is a policy choice. It helps explain why Americans are not celebrating what the media claim are newly safe streets. New Yorkers have experienced a never-ending series of sickening attacks from deranged vagrants and career criminals. All had long criminal records; none had been locked up in a mental institution or a prison for a decisive amount of time. Felony assaults in the New York City subways are up 55 percent since 2019. Crazed addicts push someone onto the subway tracks every two weeks.
Virtually all of those attacks were predictable and preventable. Local and state authorities must change the laws governing the commitment of the mentally ill; every day that the status quo remains in place is a day that the authorities have willed further mayhem. Every public official is on notice that more attacks are coming so long as schizophrenic, disaffiliated drug users are allowed to roam free. The same applies to garden-variety repeat offenders: they, too, should be off the streets for a disabling period of time, disparate impact notwithstanding. Three strikes and you’re out is too lenient. There should be no more free bites of the apple.
The federal government can use its grantmaking power to incentivize public order maintenance. Ideally, the fiction of federal grantmaking would end entirely. Though presented as a “free” windfall to localities, federal grants are simply local tax dollars sent on a long, circuitous route through federal bureaucracies and then back to their origin, minus a huge bite for administrative inefficiencies. Ending federal grantmaking would be one of the most powerful reforms Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy could make through their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Federal money should only go for purely federal functions.
Such a revolution is unlikely, however. The second-best solution is to leverage federal grants to achieve public safety. Federal homeless grants should be conditioned on facilitating involuntary commitments and on reducing the number of drug-addicted vagrants roaming the streets. Homeless outreach without a requirement of placing the vagrant in long-term confinement should not be funded. Homeless housing should not be funded unless vagrants are required to use it. Among the lies of progressive ideology, the idea that it is compassionate to allow mentally ill vagrants to decompose on city streets is among the most self-serving, turning political lassitude into a virtue.
Federal grants for police hiring (a regrettable fact of life) should be conditioned on getting rid of racial preferences in promotions. Departments should have to publish transparent data on the demographics of criminals and their victims. Supporting law enforcement research is a legitimate use of federal tax dollars, since localities are unlikely to fund such work. The federal government should underwrite empirical investigations into effective policing strategies.
The Trump administration’s biggest crime impact, however, will be via immigration enforcement. One might suppose that police chiefs would beg Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to take their illegal criminals off their hands. Once an illegal alien criminal is deported, he can no longer prey on innocent victims while cycling repeatedly through the local criminal justice system. Making an immigration case against an illegal alien is easier than getting a criminal conviction; establishing illegal presence requires no trial, witnesses, or the meeting of stringent standards of proof. That so many police chiefs and big-city sheriffs trumpet their refusal to cooperate with ICE demonstrates the power of the illegal alien lobby. Apparently, we don’t have enough illegal aliens as it is; we need to hold on to the illegals who commit non-immigration crimes as well.
The country is about to witness a prolonged firefight over issues of federal preemption and states’ rights.
The most pervasive form of local resistance to federal immigration enforcement is to dishonor what are known as detainers. ICE is notified via federal databases if a known illegal alien is booked into a prison or jail. ICE will then ask the jail or prison authorities to notify it when the illegal migrant prisoner is about to be released. ICE might also ask that the prisoner be briefly detained until ICE agents pick him up for deportation. If an illegal alien criminal is allowed to disappear back into the community, he becomes harder for ICE agents to locate—and more dangerous to apprehend.
Sanctuary jurisdictions refuse to honor detainers unless issued by a federal judge. They let illegal criminals walk out of lock-up without notifying ICE at all, or they may give immigration agents a measly 15 minutes’ notice to hustle over to meet an imminent release. Illinois is typical in its flagrant contempt for federal authority. A 2021 guidance from the state’s attorney general prohibits local officials from transferring “any person into an immigration agent’s custody” or rendering “collateral assistance to federal immigration agents,” such as coordinating an arrest in a courthouse or other public facility. If an immigration agent requests information, local officials may not provide it.
Cooperating with ICE on detainers, say pro-sanctuary police chiefs and advocates, would scare off immigrant crime victims from reporting crime. But a detainer is directed at a criminal who has already been apprehended or convicted. Honoring a detainer requires no cooperation from the illegal alien “community.”
The first Trump administration tried to withhold federal money from sanctuary jurisdictions but was blocked by all but one of the courts that heard challenges to the no-funding policy. The Supreme Court was set to hear an appeal on the matter, but the Biden administration withdrew the litigation. Since then, from fiscal year 2021 through June 2024, local jurisdictions rejected over 23,000 requests to hold alien detainees until ICE could arrive—that would be 23,000 criminals sent back to the streets who could have been efficiently removed from the country. Deportations of criminals dropped by 67 percent under President Biden compared with under President Trump.
Federal tax dollars have rolled into sanctuary jurisdictions—approximately $300 million in criminal justice grants in 2021 alone, representing over 40 percent of federal funding nationally under three main criminal justice programs. While the Biden administration was indifferent to local immigration resistance, it did require that grant recipients attest to their efforts to address racial, ethnic, gender, and LGBTQIA bias, reports Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Biden’s open borders brought a high number of criminals into the country. By October 2023, the border patrol was catching more than 47 illegal aliens a day with serious criminal histories. It was, however, the 140,000 known “got-aways” that kept U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens up at night, he said in March 2024. Illegal aliens now account for about 75 percent of arrests in midtown Manhattan, including for robbery and assault. Yet illegal alien criminal suspects are still allowed to stay in New York City shelters. These, too, should be sites of ICE apprehensions.
The Trump administration will once again refuse to send federal criminal justice grants to scofflaw jurisdictions and will be sued in return by those sanctuary jurisdictions. That will be just the start of the courtroom battles. Incoming border czar Tom Homan has threatened federal prosecutions against local officials who impede federal law enforcement. If he follows through on the threat, localities will fight back hard.
States might even start suing each other. Congress is primed to pass the Laken Riley Act, which allows states to sue the U.S. Attorney General or the homeland security secretary if an illegal alien who has been released back into the country harms the state’s residents. That new state power is unlikely to be used during the coming GOP administration, but creative attorney generals in pro-enforcement states might try a similar tactic against sanctuary states if an illegal alien whom the sanctuary state has shielded from deportation commits a crime in a pro-enforcement state.
Cops on the beat and their immediate commanders are eager to remove alien criminals, even if their big city chiefs deplore immigration enforcement. The Trump administration will strengthen a program known as 287(g), which authorizes local law enforcement to make arrests for immigration violations. No sanctuary jurisdictions will sign up for the program, but elsewhere, it can be an important force multiplier. If federal dollars are still sloshing around, they should be redirected from nonprofit agencies that help illegal aliens evade the law to police and sheriff’s departments that assist with immigration enforcement.
Congress is already moving to strengthen national sovereignty. It can further help the coming enforcement blitz by clarifying through statute that ICE detainers are not civil rights violations—an argument made by the advocates—and that they do not require a judicial warrant to be valid.
Finally, Donald Trump can use the White House bully pulpit to return honor to the police profession. Big city police departments are still 5 percent below their 2019 manpower levels, due to high rates of attrition and low rates of recruitment. The usual response to such shortages is to spray more redistributed local tax dollars—aka federal grants—back at local police departments. A better federal response would be to change the public discourse around policing by discrediting one of President Biden’s favorite false narratives: that the police are a threat to black life.
Los Angeles’s devastating firestorm has demonstrated the lethal folly of the progressive playbook. Looking a certain way is no more relevant to fighting fires than it is to enforcing the law in a constitutional, colorblind fashion. The looting that has followed that incineration was conditioned by years of lax law enforcement. And the fires themselves may be in part the product of Los Angeles’s refusal to clear its squalid homeless encampments, from which originate 50 percent of local conflagrations.
The next Trump administration can restore a sense of safety by seeking only excellence in its appointees, pursuing colorblind justice in its policies, conditioning federal dollars on public order maintenance, and enforcing the nation’s democratically supported immigration laws.
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