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President Trump has federalized the police in Washington, D.C. and deployed the National Guard, which has dramatically reduced crime. In Memphis, the mayor has requested similar assistance, and the home city of Elvis Presley will be the next to see federal deployments to combat high crime.
Chicago, however, faces one of the worst murder rates in the developed world. A city of 2.7 million, it recorded 8,227 violent crimes through July 2025, including 3,361 aggravated assaults and batteries, 865 shootings, and 288 homicides as of September 7. That homicide rate is about nine times higher than London’s, three times higher than Berlin’s, seven times higher than Paris’s, and five times higher than Canada’s national rate.
Yet Mayor Brandon Johnson has rejected federal law enforcement assistance. Instead, he insists on more social programs and divestment from policing. Despite liberal studies claiming such programs reduce crime, practical experience, particularly in New York, shows that increased enforcement, convictions, and incarceration are the most effective ways to bring crime down. Johnson, however, wants federal money for social programs, not federal officers to enforce the law.
A study published in the National Library of Medicine concluded that most crime in a society is committed by a small minority of offenders, meaning that arresting and incarcerating them can significantly reduce crime. Communicating clear punishments also serves as a deterrent. The Brennan Center found that “the police measure that most consistently reduces crime is the arrest rate of those involved in crime,” noting that felony arrest rates (except for motor vehicle thefts) rose 50–70 percent in the 1990s.
They argued that deterrence measures, the “stick”, better explained New York City’s crime decline than economic improvements. The report also credited “CompStat” procedures, which combined targeted enforcement in crime hot spots with greater managerial accountability, as the only tactic clearly linked to sustained crime reduction. Supporting this, a systematic review of hot spots policing showed that focused police actions at specific locations produced “between 6% and 13% statistically significant reductions in calls for service” compared to control areas.
Social programs, by contrast, are costly and show little measurable impact on overall crime. At best, localized initiatives report small reductions among a limited number of participants but make no difference citywide. Many studies claiming effectiveness are flawed or misrepresented to secure future funding.
For example, the Cure Violence program has been touted as producing a “17% reduction in shootings in the first year” in targeted precincts. But the NYC Council study actually states: “Relative to the counterfactual of no Cure program, we find that precincts that received Cure experienced a 17% reduction in shootings in the first year of the program.”
This finding is undermined by serious problems: the timeline spans 2006–2023 with programs starting at different points between 2012 and 2021, making comparisons inconsistent; earlier studies cherry-picked neighborhoods without controlling for other factors; one analysis was merely a computer simulation rather than real-world data; and all of the studies took place during a period of broader citywide declines in gun violence.
Similarly, summer jobs programs reported a “33–42% decline in violent crime arrests” for participants, but this result is meaningless. Fewer arrests could simply reflect reduced policing rather than reduced crime. The sample sizes were tiny, self-selected, lacked control groups, and provided no clear timeframe. Most importantly, such programs cannot be scaled to meaningfully affect crime rates across an entire city.
Stop-and-frisk has long been attacked by liberals as an invasion of privacy that disproportionately targets minorities. Some studies even claim the policy is ineffective in preventing crime. But basic logic shows otherwise: if likely criminals are stopped and frisked, more weapons and drugs will be found than if they are not.
Critics manipulated the data to discredit stop-and-frisk. They divided the number of guns recovered by the total number of stops, creating the impression of a low success rate. But every gun taken off the street matters, and the percentage is irrelevant when each recovery prevents a potential crime. What critics also ignore is the deterrent effect: when criminals know they might be stopped, they are far less likely to carry weapons in the first place.
The greatest real-life example of a city that dramatically reduced crime through policing, enforcement, arrests, and incarceration is New York City under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. During his tenure, the NYPD expanded from 28,000 officers to 40,000, a 43 percent increase. Felony arrest rates rose between 50 and 70 percent in the 1990s, while misdemeanor arrests climbed 70 percent.
The results were staggering. From 1993 to 2001, major felony offenses declined by 62.3 percent, dropping from 430,460 cases to 162,064. Between 1990 and 1999, homicide fell 73 percent, burglary 66 percent, assault 40 percent, robbery 67 percent, and vehicle theft 73 percent. Overall, violent crime dropped more than 56 percent in New York, compared to just 28 percent nationwide. Property crimes plummeted by 65 percent in the city, while the national decline was only 26 percent.
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