Trump’s return to ‘law and order’ highlights a sore spot for Democrats: crime policy

When President Trump launched an effort to address crime in Washington, D.C., he argued that the source of the city’s problems was clear.

“This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership,” Trump said from the White House last week. “The Democrats are weak on crime. Totally weak on crime,” he later added.

Throughout his time in office, Trump has criticized Democratic-led cities for what he calls “radical left” policies on criminal justice. Those attacks have grown sharper in recent days, as the president took the extraordinary step of nationalizing the D.C. police force and deploying the National Guard — all while signaling other cities may be next.

Democrats have decried Trump’s actions, arguing that while crime did surge nationwide during the pandemic, numbers have since fallen. Nonetheless, the move has exposed a political sore spot for Democrats, who have struggled to counter GOP efforts to frame itself as the party of “law and order” and establish a credible message of their own in the minds of many voters.

“The Republicans have been beating the brains out of the Democrats on these issues,” said James Morone, a political science professor at Brown University, adding that the more holistic Democratic approach to criminal justice policy has proved difficult to communicate.

“It sounds soft, ‘hey, we’ve got to worry about income flows, we have to worry about drug addiction, we have to worry about community policing,'” he said. “It’s very hard to get that message across when someone is yelling, ‘Let’s just lock ’em all up.'”

Democrats have struggled to respond to ‘law and order’

Democrats have sought to frame Trump’s actions as an attempt to distract from the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. And they were quick to dispute his claims about D.C., highlighting data shared by the Justice Department showing violent crime in the city hit a 30-year low last year and that other cities appear to be making similar progress, as murders are down around the country.

“The statistics speak for themselves,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. “It’s hard to out-message the president, especially one that lies when his mouth is moving. But you just got to battle back and rely on people to understand the facts as they are and to be really smart.”

That said, a Gallup poll from October found that a majority of Americans described crime in the U.S. as an “extremely” or “very serious” problem. When voters were asked who they trusted more on issues of crime and safety, exit polling from the election showed a narrow majority were more likely to trust Trump over former Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s an issue Democrats have wrestled with for years, as Republicans have targeted them for policies they dismiss as soft on crime — such as cashless bail and calls to “defund the police.”

“The Republicans have sort of played this like a fiddle for generations,” former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in an interview.

De Blasio held the city’s top job for two terms starting in 2014, during which time he faced a slew of intraparty battles over crime and policing.

Despite overseeing a steady drop in major felony offenses until 2021, de Blasio conceded that GOP attacks made it difficult to demonstrate wins on the issue.

“[It] didn’t matter in the eyes of the police unions, didn’t matter in the eyes of the Republican Party,” he said. “I struggle with it. And I honestly, I feel almost silly saying it now that I could not accept a world in which truth and perception were so radically out of whack.”

How Republicans have used progressive policies as a cudgel

In his announcement last week, Trump repeatedly cited cashless bail as the cause of rising crime, even though policy experts caution there isn’t data to back up that claim.

Despite Trump’s attention on the issue, it’s far from an official Democratic Party policy. While several jurisdictions around the country have implemented different bail reforms, politicians on the left have also sparred over the policy.

Democrats faced similar criticism during Trump’s first term as the “defund the police” movement gained traction in the wake of nationwide protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

While some city leaders ultimately reduced portions of police budgets and allocated that money for other services, many also came out against the idea. Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden flat-out rejected the “defund” movement, and congressional Democrats largely steered clear, instead pushing for other reforms.

Messaging versus policy

For some inside the party, the “defund” movement was an example of bad policy that created a space for Republicans to attack Democrats. In the years since Floyd’s death, Trump has continued to link the policy with Democratic leaders.

“They created a much bigger opening for Trump to make this a winning issue for himself … Because for too many years, we were weak and in the wrong place on these fundamental issues of law and order,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president and co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way.

“Democrats are still climbing out of the hole that was created by too much silence and too much support for defunding the police,” he said, adding that the consequence of not immediately rejecting the idea “tarred the Democratic Party broadly across the country with a perception that Democrats were weak and soft on crime.”

Cowan argued that Trump would likely have zeroed in on crime regardless of Democratic policy, but progressives created a sizable opportunity for Trump to make it a winning issue. Now, he said, the party’s problem lies in the policy, and leaders should embrace more centrist stances on crime, such as increasing the number of police in cities, in addition to refining their message.

“The Democratic response is more or less credible, depending on whether the party has or has not addressed its perception crisis on core law and order issues,” he added. “That is a central task for 2028, if you want to return to power.”

Other Democrats, like de Blasio, believe the problem is more one of messaging and have tried to clarify their past moves on policing. The former mayor caught the ire of Trump in 2020 after he decided to cut the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion and shift that money to other city resources.

De Blasio said the decision was meant to offset other budgetary shortfalls and “respond to the legitimate concerns of protesters who wanted to see more money go to communities.”

“It was never meant to embrace the idea of ‘defund the police,” he said. “I don’t think I did a good enough job communicating that distinction.”

To moderate Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp, who served as a senator from North Dakota until she lost reelection in 2018, the party needs to spend more time validating the unease that many voters have about crime.

“Start saying these are real concerns and real problems, and one person being victimized is one too many,” she said. “And we need to have a discussion about what [solution] works and what doesn’t work.”

“I think it’s really dangerous to say this is a perception problem,” she added. “That’s insulting to the people who don’t feel safe.”