SCOOP: Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies in the hot seat in midterm home stretch

As voters weigh public safety in November’s election, Democratic candidates across America are under scrutiny for their  soft-on-crime positions, while recent data shows Republican policies on public safety issues are effective.

A 2025 Uniform Crime Report showed that violent crime in the U.S. has hit a record low under the Trump administration, dropping 9.3 percent last year. Murder numbers decreased 18.1 percent over the year before, rape fell by nearly 8 percent, robbery declined 18.5 percent, aggravated assault dropped by over 7 percent, and motor vehicle theft decreased by about 23 percent.

“Collectively, law enforcement across the country — state, local travel and federal — has delivered for the American people the largest reduction in violent crime in U.S. history,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in an August statement. “Violent crime, and you’re talking rape, robbery, assault, all down double-digits across America.”

During his testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee in June, Attorney General Todd Blanche also noted the decrease in crime under the Trump administration.

“Federal law enforcement helped drive a 20 percent decrease in the national murder rate in 2025, arrested 44,000 violent offenders, which is double the previous year, and seized over 2,200 kilograms of fentanyl,” Blanche said.

Effective Republican public safety policies are a stumbling block for Democrats running in tossup races across the country. Among those Democrats who could be on the wrong side of the issue are former Gov. Roy Cooper (D., N.C.), Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.), all of whom Republicans believe are running on approaches that have only had negative consequences.

“Trump delivered historic low crime rates. These guys are offering the opposite,” a GOP strategist told the Washington Reporter. “That’s a brutal contrast, and Republicans will make sure nobody misses it.”

Cooper, for example, released at least 3,500 prisoners during the pandemic. The release of the criminals was the result of a little-discussed 2021 deal between Cooper’s administration and various civil rights groups. The New York Post found nearly half of the released inmates committed crimes after their release, including more than 600 charged with committing homicides, sex offenses, and other violent crimes. Additionally, 18 were later charged with murder, the Post reported.

On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska was murdered  in Charlotte, North Carolina by a criminal released by Cooper’s settlement. In a recent interview with the Reporter, Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley said Cooper’s actions as governor “always put criminals ahead of their victims and ahead of North Carolina families.”

“The reason that Decarlos Brown Jr. was back on the streets, despite having been arrested 14 times and released 14 times, was because of Roy Cooper’s soft on crime policies,” Whatley told the Reporter’s Matthew Foldi of Zarutska’s alleged killer. “Think about this: why was this monster on that car? Why was he on the streets of Charlotte? That’s because Roy Cooper set up a revolving door and unleashed people like Decarlos Brown Jr. across the state.”

Meanwhile, Michigan’s El-Sayed supports similar efforts, including “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.” His statements came during a September 2020 webinar hosted by the University of Michigan’s Carceral State Project, featuring a panel of speakers that included El-Sayed along with a convicted murderer and a registered sex offender, according to Fox News.

Likewise, Ossoff, who has backed El-Sayed, supports ending cash bail and has promised to “demilitarize” the police. Ossoff also has ties to far-left former mayor of Atlanta and staunch Defund the Police advocate Keisha Lance Bottoms, under whose leadership Atlanta saw a 58 percent increase in homicides.

Bottoms is now running for Georgia governor against Republican Rick Jackson, and Jackson has not let Bottoms’ record on crime go unnoticed.

“Six years ago tonight, Keisha Lance Bottoms let Atlanta burn,” Jackson said in May. “When the city needed her, she abandoned it. She called off the police and refused to support them. She left the most vulnerable people in the city helpless.”

Newly unearthed videos show Democrat James Talarico in Texas dreaming of a “world without prisons” and claiming that it’s possible to “make prisons obsolete.”

“Prisons allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism,” Talarico said in a 2022 speech. “If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.” 

Talarico has also said ending “over-policing” was a “really exciting opportunity,” and in 2021 voted against a bill in the Texas House that penalized cities that chose to defund their police force.

But Talarico’s opponent, former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spent more than a decade addressing crime in the Lone Star State, leading to a 25 percent decrease in violent crime from 2021 through 2025.

Americans are experiencing a historic low in crime rates thanks to Trump’s policies, and as Democrats campaign for Senate, they’re asking voters to trust their policies that clearly make crime worse.