L.A. homicide stats are good, but not a reason to dismiss law and order policies, and Trump.

The Los Angeles Times today reports the good news that the homicide rate in the city is trending downward and has been since 2021. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-09/los-angeles-homicide-total-2025. The underlying message of the article is that these statistics are occurring on their own and run contrary to President Trump’s rhetoric about unchecked crime in major cities like L.A. and Baltimore, and that the reduced level of killings even comes at a time of lower staffing levels in police forces and unnecessary over-incarceration in the prison system. The sub rosa messaging is that the homicide rate is reducing nicely on the natural, unaided by law-and-order policy changes and enforcement, or Trump’s rhetoric, or ICE enforcement.

This irrational exuberance to further denigrate the need for and success of anti-crime policies deserves a few additional observations. First, as the article lightly touches, crime rates in general in some major cities like L.A. and Baltimore are not really down, just the reported murder rates are down. Secondly, the trend’s bench mark is stated as beginning with reports of higher levels of homicides in the year 2021, and blamed on the 2020 pandemic, with no mention that 2020 was also the year District Attorney George Gascon was elected, whose campaign pledged to not enforce California’s death penalty law for murder. (This failure in reporting is journalistic malpractice.) The low point in killings is for the first six months of 2025, which also happens to coincide with Gascon’s ouster and the election of Nathan Hochman as District Attorney in November, 2024, whose campaign pledge was to enforce California’s death penalty law against murderers. (More reporting malpractice.) In the last few years, policies like “defund the police” have also been widely rejected, even by some Democratic politicians, because of the need to address the resulting higher crime rates associated with that movement. It is logical that such policy reversals may be included as one of the reasons homicides are leveling a bit in big cities. But that is unreported.

The L.A. murder rate may be trending down, but to those of us in Orange County, the recollection of those two men who drove down from Los Angeles: LeRoy Ernest Joseph McCrary and Malachi Edward Darnell, charged last summer with the smash-and-grab murder of 68-year-old Patricia McKay of New Zealand, who was simply shopping at Fashion Island in Newport Beach with her husband, is not nearly faded from memory. What a shameful thing that was.

The Times would like its readers to think that Trump is wrong about focusing on the crime rates in “blue” cities, which the reporter wants readers to believe are universally going down, at least as to reported homicides. But the 200 murders already reported in Chicago this year are still too many needless deaths, and the violent crime rate there still remains at a five-year high.

There is still far too much crime. These problems need more attention, more police, and more consequences for the perpetrators, not less, to build a safer society.