America Is More Dangerous Than It Ever Has Been
I grew up being told that crime was always going down. I believed it too, right up until I started actually reading the numbers. Now I lock my doors in the middle of the afternoon, and so should you.
Here is the figure nobody wants on the front page. The Heritage Foundation, citing FBI data, reports a 30% increase in violent crime in 2020, the largest single year jump since the agency started tracking these numbers back in the 1960s. The largest. Ever. Sit with that for a second.
And this is not one bad town having a rough year. Look at where it is happening. Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington. Eight major cities, all bleeding at once. When the biggest cities in the country all light up red on the same map, that is not a local story. That is the whole nation.
So what changed? The spike did not start out of nowhere. It started in the summer of 2020, right after cities slashed their police budgets. The order of events tells you everything. They pulled back the police, and then the violence came roaring in. You do not need a degree to connect two dots that are sitting right next to each other.
A sitting member of Congress was carjacked at gunpoint in broad daylight. Train cars are torn open in Los Angeles and left like wreckage on the tracks. Stores are chaining up their shelves or closing for good. This is the texture of daily life now.
The wave that started in 2020 never broke. It just kept rising. So when someone tells you we have never been safer, ask yourself one thing. Why are they so eager to get you to stop counting?
