Kayleigh McEnany Accuses Biden of ‘Revisionist History’ in Regards to Rising Violent Crime Rates in Cities

Former White House press secretary and co-host of “Outnumbered” on Fox News Kayleigh McEnany wrote an op-ed that accuses President Joe Biden of “revisionist history” when it comes to rising violent crime rates in cities.

A graphic that has been widely shared by many on the right, including Arkansas Governor candidate and also former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, shows violent crime surging across six major cities that are ran by Democrats.

Sanders said about the graphic, “The radical left’s defund the police rhetoric has real consequences. As governor I will stand with our brave law enforcement officers, restore law and order, and NEVER defund the police!”

The radical left's defund the police rhetoric has real consequences.

As governor I will stand with our brave law enforcement officers, restore law and order, and NEVER defund the police! pic.twitter.com/oF8ANGLT33

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) June 23, 2021

McEnany brought up her time working for former President Donald Trump in her piece and said: Last June, I stood at the White House podium and asked an important question: “[W]hy – at the time when violent crime [is] coming down, why would we defund the police who are… responsible for helping America to get to a place where our streets are safe?” 

When asked whether it was the Trump White House’s position that defunding the police would lead to increased crime, I replied without hesitation, “Yeah, absolutely” before laying out the important work of law enforcement in 2018: 11,970 murder arrests; 88,130 robbery arrests; 395,800 aggravated assault arrests; and 495, 900 violent crime arrests. 

“That’s the police officers who are doing the arresting,” I told the White House press corps.  “You eliminate police officers, you will have chaos, crime and anarchy in the streets, and that’s something that’s unacceptable to the president.”

Fast forward one year later and here we are, McEnany continued.

In Minneapolis, where money was diverted from police, there has been an 89% increase in homicides year-to-year.

In New York City, which slashed $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s funds, felony assaults increased by 20.5% while shootings were up 74% in May compared to one year earlier.

And in Los Angeles, where the police department saw its budget cut by $150 million, murders in Los Angeles County climbed by 95%. 

I issued a warning to each of these jurisdictions from the White House podium last August, warning of the bloody consequences that would follow their irresponsible decisions to cut funding from police. 

Beyond the defund jurisdictions, the FBI’s nationwide murder rate saw its “largest single year increase since the agency began publishing uniform data in 1960,” one outlet reported recently. Why?  “[D]eadly violence rose as engaged policing fell.”

In other words, the demonization of police officers by the left led to law enforcement disengagement and deadly results for Americans.

Amid the surge in violence across the country, the Biden White House has, for the most part, stayed woefully silent – until this week. 

Interestingly, as Americans now rank crime one of the most important issues, according to a new poll, the Biden administration has announced that on Wednesday the president is set to address, you got it – crime. 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed to divert blame for the crime spike, on Monday, when she noted that crime has been on the rise “for the last year and a half,” therefore preexisting the Biden administration. 

This effort to divert blame to Trump ignores entirely the two phenomenon that have taken place over the last year: The defund police movement coupled with violent riots across the nation – both of which President Trump and his administration denounced while Biden rarely weighed in on the issue. 

Democrat nominee-turned-President Joe Biden did not make persistent calls for “law and order.” 

Biden has not bolstered the role of police officers the way President Trump did, regularly acknowledging the importance of law enforcement during police week with speeches at the National Peace Officer’s Memorial Service. 

And Biden did not sustain the law and order policies President Trump put in place. Instead, he cancelled them. 

In a clear signal to rioters that there will not be repercussions, Biden, in May, revoked Trump’s executive order, declaring “no individual or group has the right to damage, deface or remove any monument by use of force.”

Further underscoring that point, the Biden Justice Department has dropped “almost half of federal cases against Portland rioters.”

Perhaps most significant of all, however, was Biden’s decision to do away with President Trump’s memo directing the federal government to label lawless cities as “anarchist jurisdictions.” Under the order, cities like New York City, Portland and Seattle were classified as “anarchist jurisdictions,” and, as a consequence, their federal funding could be pulled. 

These were but a few Trump-era policies directed at tackling violent crime. Notable as well was Operation LeGend, named for LeGend Taliferro, a beautiful 4-year-old boy from Kansas City who was shot and killed in his bed. Through federal-local partnership, Operation LeGned led to 6,000 arrests, including 467 for homicide.

By contrast, the 46th president’s remarks on crime in American cities on Wednesday come far too late and will offer far too little. Rather than taking action, as President Trump did, President Biden has chosen to stick his head in the sand. 

Derelict Democrats in liberal strongholds across the country are directly responsible for igniting the increase in crime we have witnessed over the last year and a half. 

Instead of meaningfully addressing the bloodshed in our streets, the presidency of Joe Biden has sustained it.

The New York Post reported on Psaki’s comments on Monday:

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Monday appeared to embrace a Democratic argument that anti-brutality protests and the subsequent ‘Defund the Police’ push aren’t to blame for rising crime — despite statistics that suggest otherwise.

Psaki said crime began increasing about 18 months ago when the COVID-19 pandemic started — and not 13 months ago with the nationwide protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop.

“There’s been actually a rise in crime over the last five years, but really the last 18 months,” Psaki said at her daily press briefing, ahead of a speech by Biden on Wednesday on rising crime, which Psaki said the White House believes is actually linked to the availability of guns.

The mention of five years ago appears to reference an uptick in certain types of crime that some analysts called the “Ferguson effect” after nationwide unrest over the August 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown during an altercation with a police officer in a St Louis suburb. That uptick was theorized to be the result of police being unwilling to enforce certain laws for fear of being vilified.

Nationwide, crime rates dipped during the ’90s and early 2000s before violent crime began to creep higher and then took off in the second half of 2020

New York City’s murder rate, for example, dropped steadily from more than 2,000 victims in 1990 and 1991 before bottoming out with 328 murders in 2014.

The murder rate rose slightly in New York City to 352 in 2015 before declining to a recent annual low of 289 murders in 2018. The rate ticked up to 319 in 2019 before soaring 44 percent to 462 murders in 2020, driven by slayings in the second half of the year.

The national crime rate gradually declined over two decades before also increasing in 2015 and remaining elevated in 2016. When 2020 data is complete, the national murder rate is expected to be about 25 percent above 2019.

Psaki describing the crime bump as dating back five years but “really” 18 months ago reflects a Democratic argument that more crime is happening because of economic conditions associated with COVID-19 lockdowns that started in March 2020 rather that often unprosecuted lawlessness linked to rioting, looting and police defunding beginning at the end of May 2020.

But the backdating is belied by crime statistics from major cities that experienced significantly more crime in the first five months of 2021 than in the first five months of 2020 — and both periods are included in Psaki’s 18-month timeframe.

New York City had 17.4 percent more murders, 73 percent more shootings and 24.9 percent more car thefts as of the end of May compared to the year-to-date total in May 2020.

In Washington, DC, murders as of late May were up 25 percent compared to the same time in 2020 and vehicle thefts were up 34 percent.

Psaki said “the president feels a lot a great deal of the crime we’re seeing is a result of gun violence, You can expect he’ll speak to that and his commitment to continuing to address gun violence and gun safety in the country.”

Psaki said Biden is a supporter of keeping police “on the beat” and that his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which passed in March, included funds “to help small businesses [and] help keep cops and firefighters on the beat.”

Democrats are divided on police funding and the party’s left wing cut large sums from police departments last year in New York, Minneapolis and other cities.

Biden historically advocated for extremely harsh penalties for criminals — so much so that he’s been rebuked for it by both leftwing and conservative critics. He lobbied for a since-repealed 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine, which was more commonly used by blacks, and powder cocaine favored by wealthy whites. On his final day as president, Donald Trump released two prisoners serving life without parole for marijuana under Biden’s 1994 crime law.