Anti-crime policies work. So do pro-crime policies.
Part of this is the Ferguson Effect. But it's not just the wave of political and violent attacks on police officers that began under Obama. It's the whole pro-crime agenda of "criminal justice reform" that focuses on freeing criminals and making it harder to lock them up. Like so many of today's bad ideas, these were tried in the seventies. And the results were exactly the same.
Now they're starting to kick in harder.
Increases of violent crime and homicides in a few urban centers—including Chicago, Baltimore, and Las Vegas—have driven up the national violent crime numbers for the second year in a row, according to F.B.I. data. Police officials and criminologists are divided on the exact causes of the upsurge, The New York Times reports:
“The question really is, what is different now from 15 years ago in terms of why crime has increased?” said John K. Roman, a criminologist at the University of Chicago. “And the only thing that has changed is the distrust between heavily policed communities and local police. It’s not a coincidence that cities that have crime increases have also had problems between communities and the police.”
That's one thing that has changed. But not the only thing.
The good news is that the Obama era is over. And Jeff Sessions is a law and order guy. As is Trump. That wasn't always a given.
If Jeb Bush had won, we could have easily ended up with the libertarian pro-crime lobby that's pushing things like Right on Crime setting policy. And that would mean that the Obama era of pro-crime never ended. As it is, far too many GOP governors have drunk the pro-crime kool-aid. Meanwhile the media keeps venerating Black Lives Matter and celebrating anthem protests and black nationalist propaganda from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ava DuVernay. As long as the left keeps pushing garbage like Between the World and Me or 13th, which treat crime as some sort of white conspiracy against black people, this will only get worse.
There's a straightforward correlation. Pro-crime policies work. And they kill black people, first and foremost. Black nationalists would rather kill black people than save lives.