Ex-president falsely claims US is in grip of violent crime wave, and vows to shield officers from legal accountability

Donald Trump has pledged to shield police officers from legal accountability if he is re-elected as president after falsely claiming the US is in the grip of a wave of violent crime that he blamed on the Black Lives Matter movement and people crossing the Mexican border.

Speaking to police officers in Michigan on Tuesday, the former president sought to pin responsibility for the imagined crisis on his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, whom he characterised as among “Marxist district attorneys” with a record of being anti-police and pro-criminal during her term as the district attorney in San Francisco in the 2000s.

At the same time, Trump lamented his own legal difficulties, including his criminal convictions for fraud in New York and other looming prosecutions.

“They go after guys like me, but they don’t go after guys that kill people,” he said.

Flanked by local sheriffs in Howell, a small city in greater Detroit where a group of white supremacists marched last month chanting “We love Hitler, we love Trump” and carrying signs reading “White Lives Matter”, Trump painted a picture of Americans living in fear of leaving their homes because of crime.

“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be,” he said.

The former president claimed that this alleged crime wave materialised when Joe Biden and Harris took office.

“Since Comrade Kamala Harris took office, her administration’s crime statistics show she’s presided over a 43% increase in violent crime. These are all government numbers,” he claimed.

In fact, official statistics show that violent crime is at an almost 50-year low in the US.

Nonetheless, Trump pledged to “crack down on local Marxist DAs who refuse to enforce the law” while, he said, ruining the lives of police officers for doing their jobs.

“Over the past four years, the Marxist left has waged a vicious war on law enforcement in our country. They’ve taken away the dignity and the spirit and the life of some of these police officers, and that’s why you see it – the crime is so out of control in our country,” he claimed.

Trump said that the police “have a lot of difficulty with the laws of our land”.

“We’re going to get rid of that difficulty, because they shouldn’t have difficulty, our police,” he said.

Trump added: “We’re going to be guaranteeing immunities.”

The former president accused Harris of a “pro-crime, anti-police record”.

“She repeatedly endorsed defunding the police,” he said. “If she ever had a chance, she would do whatever she could to defund the police because that’s where her spirit is, that’s where her heart is, and we can’t have a president like that.”

In 2020, then senator Harris gave support to the “defund the police” movement in the wake of a white police officer’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Harris said at the time that it was right that BLM questioned the amount of money spent on “militarising” police departments at the expense of social services, housing and education

“This whole movement is about, rightly, saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she told the radio programme Ebro in the Morning.

The former president also claimed that Harris bore responsibility for a rise in shoplifting as California’s attorney general a decade ago.

“She came up with a concept of, $950 and below you don’t even get prosecuted. So guys are walking into stores with calculators to figure [it] out,” he said, to the evident amusement of the police officers around him.

“Did you know that they have calculators adding it up? They want to make sure they’re under $950, but it didn’t matter, because they didn’t prosecute the ones that went over either.”

In fact, there is no such policy in California and the accusation appears rooted in a ballot measure passed by voters in 2014 that reclassified some thefts and misdemeanors.

Trump blamed much of the imagined increase in crime on people crossing the Mexican border, for which he also blamed Harris as the supposed “border tsar”, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. He also claimed that some Latin American countries are exporting their criminals to the US.

“We have criminals from all over the world pouring into our country right now,” he said.

However, Trump was upset about at least one instance of prosecutors upholding the law.

“We’re not getting justice in New York,” he said of his own conviction over paying hush money to an adult film star.

The former president is also facing criminal prosecutions over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his handling of classified documents.

“Anytime I fly over a state, they indict you. Got indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone,” he told the police officers, to laughter.