Trump: ‘You have to give police back their authority’

Former President Trump said cities struggling with a rise in crime have to “give police back their authority.”

Fox News reporter Lawrence Jones asked Trump, during a Sunday interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that aired Monday on “Fox & Friends,” what he would do to “address the skyrocketing crime that’s going on.” 

Trump, after taking a swipe at the Democratic-controlled cities of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles for their high crime rates, said the answer is to “give the police back their authority.”

The former president then likened the crime rates in the U.S. to violence in Afghanistan, claiming that while 260 people were shot in Chicago, “in Afghanistan, you don’t have 260 people shot.”

“What’s terrible is in Chicago you have 200 — think of it — 260 people were shot last, 260 people. In Afghanistan, you don’t have 260 people shot. In fact, by the way, in the last year in Afghanistan, we didn’t lose one soldier,” Trump said.

“But we didn’t have a person shot. We didn’t have one soldier killed in Afghanistan for over a year,” Trump added. He also previously made the comparison between Chicago and Afghanistan while president.

“You have to give the police back their authority,” the former president told Fox News. “You know, the police can stop this.”

Trump has frequently objected to the “defund the police” calls adopted by some progressive Democrats amid nationwide protests over police misconduct. 

Violent crime rates in the U.S. are still tracking lower than previous decades, but the spike has sparked newfound attention on the issue.

At least 108 people were shot in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend alone, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The murder rate in the U.S. increased from 5 per 100,000 people in 2019 to around 6.2 per 100,000 in 2020 as of last month, according to preliminary data from the FBI.

The statistic illustrated a significant jump. The rate, however, was closer to 10 as recently as 1991.

The rise in the murder rate increased in the early months of 2021, when President Biden took office and as the country slowly returned to a semblance of normalcy from the coronavirus pandemic.

The New York Times in March published an article that examined a sample of 37 cities with data for the first three months of the year, which found that there was an 18 percent increase in murders compared to the same time period in 2020.