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The time is auspicious to deliver some major blows to America’s crime problem.

It’s not that murder has been increasing lately—it’s been drifting downward at an accelerating rate since it shot up 30 percent during the last week in May 2020 when the liberal establishment declared a “racial reckoning” over George Floyd (or as they like to now hand-wave away their culpability: “during the pandemic”).

A month ago, I wrote:

Presumably, conservatives will soon start pointing out how sharply crime has fallen since Trump was elected last November.

So, let’s start the ball rolling. The CDC’s count of homicides comes with a six-month delay to let coroners make sure a suspicious death really was a homicide, so we can only check homicide victimizations through February 2025. But November 2024–February 2025 saw 15.3 percent fewer homicides than the same months a year earlier.

But there is even better news: The mindset that facilitates violence and disorder, the racist antiwhite prejudice of the mainstream media, has been knocked back on its heels since November.

“The mindset that facilitates violence and disorder, the racist antiwhite prejudice of the mainstream media, has been knocked back on its heels since November.”

It’s not just that Trump won again. If Trump had been reelected by a surge solely in the white vote, liberals would have seen that as all the more reason to speed up the Great Replacement. But this time, he won with striking growth in the votes of non-whites, who were supposed to be the Good Guys who would save us from Trump in the standard narrative. This has demoralized white progressives, who now wonder if they’ve just been replacing whites with people who like Donald Trump much more than Mitt Romney.

So, even though liberals keep insisting that because crime has been falling lately that means there’s no reason to do anything about it, instead, it’s time to keep the pressure up against criminals.

Consider the history of murder in New York City. Rudy Giuliani had great success driving it back down to a normal level for post–John Lindsay New York during his first six years in office, but then the number of murders stopped dropping in his last two years. So, when Michael Bloomberg came into office in 2002, I figured he’d be doing okay just to keep the murder rate at Giuliani’s level. But the crime-fighting billionaire wasn’t satisfied and instead oversaw a consistent decline year after year for a dozen years. The NYPD was allowed to change the culture by terrifying the bad guys into leaving their illegal handguns at home.

The single biggest impediment to the rest of the country making New York City-size progress against crime is the embargo on racial realism about who commits the majority of murders. A crackdown on crime is always going to require more of a crackdown on black criminals than on Asian, white, or Hispanic criminals because there are a lot more black criminals per capita. That’s the inevitable by-product of blacks being an incredible order of magnitude more likely to kill than whites. You can’t effectively fight crime without cops being more likely per capita to confront blacks than whites.

Nobody is supposed to mention racial crime statistics in the newspapers (The New York Times has only printed the term “black homicide rate” three times in the past 52 years), so many influential Americans are poorly informed. Thus, they were easily misled during the Great Awokening by cherry-picked statistics and incidents like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd.

One exception to this pattern was Mayor Bloomberg, who was reported telling the Aspen Institute in 2015 (with some exaggeration):

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

Not surprisingly, Bloomberg was extremely effective at fighting crime.

The New York Times mostly gave Bloomberg a pass on his hard-nosed race realism because it obviously made New York a better place for Times staffers to live. But towns with less important inhabitants, such as Ferguson, Mo., elicited the NYT’s wrath.

In contrast, even the most horrifying incidents of black-on-white crime, such as that black schizo with fourteen arrests on his rap sheet murdering the pretty blonde on the Charlotte, N.C., light rail system, call forth cricket chirps from the national press.

The New York Times finally took a time-out from its Emmett Till breaking news coverage (427 pieces over the past decade) to run a Rightwingers Pounce article on the Charlotte slasher in which three of its reporters explained why they feel morally justified in covering up black-on-white crime:

After the video’s release, a number of influential conservatives also accused major news outlets, including ‘The New York Times,’ of ignoring the story because the crime was committed by a Black man against a white woman….

The idea that mainstream news outlets downplay crimes committed by Black people has become more of a talking point in some conservative circles in recent years. The critique has emerged even as liberal critics of the news media have argued that crime coverage by American news outlets is distorted by anti-Black bias.

Then the reporters hilariously point out in their news (not opinion) article that North Carolina whites have a history of responding to coverage of black (excuse me, Black) criminality with white supremacist uprisings:

In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

After all, 1898 or 2025: What difference does it make? No matter what year it is, whites still have the same evil genes. Unlike Blacks, whites just aren’t reasonable. We could show Blacks the video of George Floyd’s death over and over and over and it’s not like Blacks would then riot from May through October 2020. (They didn’t, did they?)

Seriously, there are a number of steps we could take to make city life better.

The first is, of course, to round up the few dozen or few hundred most dangerous lunatics in town, the kind who are most likely to attack public transit passengers, and send them to new asylums in the countryside. (For example, when I moved to Chicago’s lakefront in 1982, I tried to live without a car. The winter turned out to be not too bad, but by summer the crazies on the bus had gotten depressing, so I gave up and started driving to work.)

It’s time to ban masks on the street. Northern cities should only allow ski masks to be worn in the depths of winter, and anti-infection masks should require a doctor’s prescription and be printed with unique QR codes on the outside.

Facial recognition technology has come a long way. Let’s use it more.

Over the years, I’ve read at least a half-dozen interviews with black big-city police chiefs complaining about how beefs on social media lead knuckleheads to kill each other. Why not use artificial intelligence to track the social media of gang members with criminal records? If two aspiring rappers are threatening each other, send them automatic texts explaining that if one of them turns into an expiring rapper, the other will be a prime suspect.

A long-range reform: European cities tend to have more bourgeois families living in them in part because they have apartment buildings better suited for kids being able to play outside in safety. When Alicia Pederson lived in Florence, Italy, where they’ve been perfecting the art of city living for the past thousand years, she noticed that bourgeois families lived in apartments built around a secure, landscaped courtyard where their kids played outdoors with the other children whose parents could afford to live there.

These urban family homes were made possible by the perimeter block (a.k.a. courtyard block)—a building form common in European cities but rare in the United States. Each block is enclosed by ten to twenty apartment buildings, typically four to six stories tall, built wall-to-wall to form a continuous perimeter around a central courtyard. Because the buildings are wide yet shallow, each unit usually has a front facade facing the public street and a rear facade opening onto the private courtyard. In this way, European courtyard blocks offer the functional equivalent of a “big house with a yard” while preserving the density and mixed-use character essential for walkable, affordable urban neighborhoods.

I’ve stayed in one such building in Queens with my kids and it was great.

But to make them places for families to invest in, buildings where you feel good about sending your kids out into the joint garden to play with your neighbors’ kids, the tenants need to be homogeneous in terms of class: no affordable-housing lottery winners.

American cities are not inexorably doomed to decay. But to figure out how to solve their problems, we have to discuss them openly and honestly. The crucial step in that process is to laugh into extinction the prestige press’ racist presumption that if finally apprised of the facts, the white burghers of North Carolina would stage a pogrom.