A policeman on duty at Inner Harbor, Baltimore. (Getty Images)
The Dish made a big deal about the surge in violent crime in the wake of the BLM mania in 2020, so it behooves me to acknowledge a big and wonderful piece of news. The post-BLM Covid peak of lawlessness has come and gone. Better still: crime, especially violent crime, is crashing to historic lows. Didn’t see that coming, did you?
The available data from 2024 and the first third of of 2025 suggests a strong possibility that the United States will report the lowest murder rate ever recorded, the lowest property rate ever recorded, and the lowest violent crime rate since 1968. […] Under these assumptions, the 2025 reported violent crime rate of 335 per 100k would be the lowest since 1969 while the reported property crime rate of 1,677 would be the lowest since ... ever.
Among the standouts: Chicago, with a 72 percent reduction in carjackings since 2023; Baltimore, which had 344 homicides in 2021, had just 45 by May this year; Birmingham had had 76 murders by June 30 in 2024; by June 30 this year, it was just 37. Murders in New York City also dropped by 23 percent from this time last year, Los Angeles 30 percent, and even Washington DC has seen a mild decline.
So let me immediately confirm all my priors. Just kidding. The truth is we are still finding out a lot about what’s been going on, and no one knows for sure. But here are some factors to consider. It’s still highly plausible that the crime surge in Covid — which was unique to the US — was caused primarily by the pullback of policing that followed BLM. It jumped soon after the upper-middle-class, anti-police demos in the middle of that year. It was another example of the Ferguson effect, compounded by unique Covid conditions.
The plague and its excessive lockdowns robbed many of those most likely to commit crime — young men, especially young black men — of jobs and schooling and things to do. So no surprise that a recent study found that cities with larger numbers of young men experienced the sharpest increase in crime. 75 percent of the public-sector jobs lost in Covid were in local government, so social services that try to prevent crime also collapsed.
Why the sharp decline since? Multi-determined, as my therapist used to say. Voters adjusted, electing tough-on-crime mayors like San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie, Philly’s Cherelle Parker, and NYC’s Eric Adams, and getting rid of jokesters like Chesa Boudin. And so did the cops. After pulling back, they didn’t add numbers, but their strategies evolved. Focusing on the few who commit the most crimes, and innovating deterrence programs like Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, appears to have made a real difference:
This model, according to Daniel Webster, an expert on gun violence at Johns Hopkins University, is one of focused deterrence ... Young men caught up in the criminal-justice system are given a choice: sort yourself out or, ultimately, end up in jail. The carrot is provided by charities: two in Baltimore, Roca and YAP, give therapy and job training to young men referred to them by the police. If the men do not co-operate, cops provide the stick.
And there’s been a huge surge in the last three years in local government spending on housing, street lighting, public safety, and neighborhood and social centers. Biden's DOJ also helped by big increases in grants for violence reduction.
So we did not need massive new numbers of cops; we needed better cops and smarter policing, more regular jobs for young men, an end to the ruinously long lockdowns, and a restoration of the social infrastructure that can keep young men out of trouble. Demographics haven’t hurt either. The average age of Americans is now nearly 40, compared to 30 in 1980. Older populations commit less crime.
But what we’ve seen here is what I’d argue liberal democracy can do at its best. One party is more emphatic on punishing crime, the other on preventing it, and a fruitful interaction can get us the best of both worlds, with the voters as deciders, as time goes by and conditions constantly change. Liberal democracy offers us this kind of pragmatism, a fusion of right and left ideas. Polarized polities governed by strongmen who upend even the successful policies of their opponents are disasters in comparison.
And I’d remind the Democrats that this good news, especially in liberal cities, is not widely appreciated, and they should make it so — and take some credit. I also recall the phrase that Tony Blair once used to re-credentialize the British left with the middle classes: “Tough on Crime. Tough on the Causes of Crime.” Not one or the other. But both. Blair won three elections on that. And Clinton won two.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a chat with Thomas Mallon on literature and the AIDS crisis; responding to criticism of my NYT piece on the gay rights movement; reader discussion of my piece on Trump’s migrant crackdown; 10 notable quotes from the week in news; 19 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a Native American take on Led Zeppelin; a pastoral window in England; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a renewing subscriber:
I just got the note for my annual renewal, and I thought I should write to say how much the Weekly Dish has meant to me. Yes, I am one of those who frequently disagrees with you, but your commitment to seeing the truth and going where the facts lead — including reassessments of your conclusions — makes me a very long-term and devoted fan. I seem to only email when I’m annoyed, so I’m grateful when you post positive comments from other subscribers. To another year!
So grateful for the continued support. Another writes:
This is my only paid subscription and I’m happy to continue. I appreciate your insights, whether we are in agreement or not. I am 77, but I recall a lesson from my father that went something like this: We should listen, especially to those with whom we disagree. Why? 1) We might learn something. 2) We might simply understand someone or some issue better. 3) It just might change how we see things and our own opinion. 4) If none of that happens, we will be better prepared to argue against the issue having listened to the other side.
I find myself generally in agreement with you, but I’m moved to think a bit about another perspective when we disagree — a worthwhile outcome and worth the price of the subscription.
New On The Dishcast: Thomas Mallon
Tom is a novelist, essayist, and critic, who once described himself as a “supposed literary intellectual/homosexual/Republican.” He’s the former literary editor of GQ and a professor emeritus of English at GW. He’s the author of 11 books of fiction, including Up With the Sun, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers — which was adapted into a miniseries. His nonfiction has focused on plagiarism (Stolen Words), letters (Yours Ever), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage). His new book is The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994, an emotional tour of NYC during the AIDS crisis.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the “mixed marriages” of AIDS, and Hitchens before cancel culture. That link also takes you to commentary on the pod with Ed Luce on geopolitics and other episodes. Readers also discuss my latest piece on Trump’s draconian crackdown on migrants. Plus, a dose of Truman.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, trans activist Shannon Minter debating trans issues, Scott Anderson on the Iranian Revolution, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Some response to some criticism. Jack Butler at National Reviewtackled my op-ed in a piece titled “The Obergefell Slippery Slope Was Real.” Slippery slope arguments work, it seems to me, if you can point to specific results from a specific event, like Obergefell in 2015. So did that year presage a new era for marriage? Well, the marriage rate was 35.1 per 1000 people in 2010 and is now 34.4. The decline is less severe and the slope the least slippery than anything before 2010. Divorce rates, meanwhile, have continued to fall — led by gay male marriages, which appear to have greater longevity than straights’.
Matthew Franck in Public Discourseclaims that “that same-sex marriage has been largely a cultural failure,” which is news to me. Support for gay marriage was at 58 percent the month after Obergefell in 2015. It’s now 69 percent — down a tad among Republicans recently because of trans extremism’s effect. If that’s failure, I don’t know what success would be. Then Franck argues that gay marriage was the key pathway to:
in vitro fertilization, gamete sales, surrogacy, de facto baby shopping, genetic screening (and destruction) of embryos, polyamory …
But all those things were around long before gay marriage, driven overwhelmingly by straights. The theocons, influenced by a Thomism that sees any increase in sex outside heterosexual marriage as baleful, cannot point to any specific thing gay marriage did to accelerate any of these trends. Unsurprising, because same-sex marriages amount to just one percent of the total.
On the queer theory left, there was a piece in The Advocate that simply reiterated critical queer and gender theory as the core of the movement, as if that refuted, rather than proved, my point. And there was also an aside in a New Yorkerpiece by Julian Lucas, who begins a review of a new exhibition of paintings of gays, lesbians, and trans people over a century ago by equating the treatment of this sexual minority under Trump with — yes! — under Hitler. For Lucas, America with gay marriage and full civil rights for trans people is experiencing a backlash just like the Nazi persecution. He notes how the Nazis shut down Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering institute and
burned his research. The flames have again come so close that the show’s co-curators, Jonathan D. Katz — a founding figure in queer art history — and Johnny Willis, struggled to find a venue in the United States.
Yes, he reviews an exhibition on “queer” art in Chicago at a time of simply unprecedented freedom for gays and trans people as if we were about to enter a book-burning genocidal campaign. That’s the worldview from Remnick’s woker-than-woke New Yorker. Then this as the kicker:
The writer Andrew Sullivan recently opined that queer and trans radicals have hijacked a once respectable movement for gay and lesbian equality. The usual retort to such cavilling is to say that a trans woman threw the first brick at Stonewall. Arguably, though, Sullivan’s allegation of coattail-riding has it even more backward: if so many of the first homosexuals defined themselves as having a “soul” of the opposite sex, wasn’t it because, at the time, that was the more legible bid for acceptance than the bare fact of same-sex desire?
Note that the celebrated fact-checking department at The New Yorker did not check if “a trans woman threw the first brick at Stonewall.” No historian believes that. It isn’t true. The only “trans women” associated with the Stonewall riots were Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Neither was there when the riot started. The New Yorker just made it up.
I also said nothing about “coat-tailing” in my NYT piece. Trans people cannot “coat-tail” gays; in the US, we both got civil rights protection at the exact same time, in the same Bostock ruling under, yes, Trump, written by a Trump appointee (just like the Third Reich). Nor was I “caviling”; I was strongly objecting to critical queer and gender theory’s replacement of a successful liberal movement for civil rights with a failing illiberal one for the end of the sex binary.
Lucas then argues that the first homosexuals claimed “the soul of the opposite sex” as a more acceptable way of claiming their gayness, and therefore somehow homos coat-tailed on transgenderism from the very start, refuting a point I didn’t make. This is like the insane argument than the only reason we have gay rights today is because black transwomen did all the work in the past. It is like Rachel Maddow’s Big Lie that “Stonewall was a trans riot.” It’s an ideological re-writing of history to see homosexual love as essentially an unfinished aspect of being transgender. Gay men are really women; lesbians are really men; and they need the courage to admit they’re all really trans. Or “queer”.
But the protective shield some gay men used to protect themselves by saying they had the soul of a woman shows precisely how gayness — if gayness means MEN loving and fucking MEN — has always been far less legitimate, even to the Nazis, than transness. Gay men have been culturally “transed” as women for centuries, and now the transqueers are on the case. What unites Nazi ideology and critical queer and gender theory is that gay men are not really men at all.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Epstein mess, the ongoing tariff spree, and keeping porn from kids. Below are a few examples, followed by a few new substacks:
Noah Carl makes the case for “why conservatives should be anti-car.”
In a new book, Lawrence Krauss tackles Trump’s war on science.
The novelist Michael Chabon makes the jump to Substack. The UK mag Prospectjoins to serve up free offerings.
If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results. Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s how one sleuth began a long and heartbreaking entry recently:
My original VFYW book was incinerated in the Palisades Fire, likely late morning on January 8th. The sofa went too, and given that the people who sold it to me lied about pet-friendliness, that at least is unlamented.
Dougal and the dearly departed VFYW book
What follows is long, and I do not expect you to reproduce it. It’s just been a time, and I thought I would use this as a way to collect my thoughts, but also to put a full stop on it. It’s as much for my Sent folder, and so perhaps it’s selfish.
This sleuth didn’t think so:
The long L.A. wildfire report from the Santa Monica super-sleuth has to be one of the most authentic, generous, and moving pieces of writing I’ve come upon on any topic for as long as I can remember. (And as much as I love reading the weekly VFYW writeup, it’s not like I approach it expecting to be touched emotionally.) At first I braced myself to read of a bad end for Dougal the beagle, but once I realized Dougal was going to survive, I surrendered absolutely to the sleuth’s gripping story.
The story is here if you’d like to read it — all the way down the page and alongside many poignant pics. The following one stands out in particular, with the caption, “My friend Jules holding Dougal and ruining a cashmere cardigan in the process so that Dougal didn’t get the ash on his paws — or get his beagle nose into whatever else lies in that”:
