You may recall the #DEFUNDTHEPOLICE movement, which attempted to reduce or eliminate police budgets in major cities. After surging crime in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it has become obvious that cutting police budgets was not a great idea. At City Journal, Rafael A. Mangual discusses the costs of crime to society, explaining:
Though it’s not easy to capture all of crime’s ripple effects, a robust social-science literature offers well-informed estimates of the social costs of at least some offenses—and the figures are alarming. In a 2010 study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, an international scholarly journal, scholars from the University of Miami and University of Colorado–Denver provided updated, crime-specific estimates of the social costs associated with offenses ranging from murder to theft. The authors note that “more than 23 million criminal offenses were committed in 2007, resulting in approximately $15 billion in economic losses to the victims and $179 billion in government expenditures [all in 2008 dollars] on police protection, judicial and legal activities, and corrections.” In today’s dollars, that totals roughly $290 billion—more than the U.S. Department of Education spent in 2024. To contextualize those numbers further, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated the total annual price tag of major weather and climate disasters (those exceeding $1 billion) between 2020 and 2024 at just under $150 billion.
Action Line: Funding law and order is an investment. The Trump administration is taking that to heart and is using every tool it has to invest in the future of American society. Crime rates have plummeted, and Americans are safer than they were just a year ago. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
