Officials in President Trump’s Justice Department have been scrutinizing crime data in recent months — they’ve found evidence that Democratic politicians have been skewing crime stats for their own benefit ahead of the midterm elections, The Post has learned.
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker — a vocal opponent of Trump’s use of federal troops for both immigration enforcement and fighting big-blue-city crime — has lately touted double-digit declines in Chicago crime rates where “shootings and homicides on our highways are down 60, 70, 80% depending on where you look.”
But the number of felonies in Chicago — not to mention New York, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. — is declining only because woke prosecutors are knocking down felonies to something less severe for political reasons, DOJ sources say.
Famous among them is Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who has continued to allow violent offenders to plead to misdemeanors instead of felonies even after committing robberies or violent assaults.
One Trump DOJ source pointed to the recent case of David Mazariegos, the sword-wielding maniac who was arrested last week for the allegedly unprovoked killing of straphanger Nicola Tanzi, stomping him on the head repeatedly outside a Brooklyn subway station.
Mazariegos has a long criminal record and yet this past July, just before his latest alleged wanton act, an NYC judge lowered his bail in an assault case because prosecutors didn’t charge him with a felony and instead settled for a misdemeanor.
People inside the Trump DOJ say Mazariegos isn’t an outlier, but the norm in big cities run by leftist politicians who are purposely obscuring the results of their lax policing policies.
“If these public officials were CEOs who purposely manipulated losses into earnings, they would face serious criminal fraud charges,” said one Trump DOJ official who asked not to be quoted by name.
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter.
A spokesman for the Manhattan DA didn’t return a request for comment.
Exodus from blue cities
When the DOJ’s stats are released, possibly in the coming weeks, they should be a wake-up call for the Democratic Party.
That’s because these big-city economies will continue to sour as more taxpaying residents leave for places that provide safety.
Of course, the Dem leadership must also find the necessary guts to push back against the woke policies and policing edicts of far-leftists like AOC and Zohran Mamdani who are ascendant in their party.
DOJ sources believe Pritzker’s recent talking points are part of a concerted effort by the national Dems to hide the various forms of blight created by their support for police defunding measures to appease the social justice types who believe law enforcement is racist.
In the meantime, maybe they can change public perception enough that they can win back the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterms.
What’s equally unsettling is that even in the fugazy stats touted by the Dems, you can see significant increases in violent crimes when the numbers are put into proper context.
Take the felony stats in NYC, which have recently been touted by Mayor Adams’ police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, on the NYPD website as reaching historic lows in all major categories.
“Murders are down citywide by more than 17.7% (241 vs. 293) year-to-date . . . Burglary dropped 3.8% (9,410 vs. 9,783) for the year . . . Felony assault is down by 0.8% (22,389 vs. 22,580) for the year,” she said in a press release.
No one doubts that Tisch both means well and has done a good job given the bad hand she was dealt: a crime epidemic that exploded after the 2020 social justice movement embraced by former lefty mayor Comrade Bill de Blasio, who instituted rules that prevent cops from doing their jobs (aka no stop-and-frisk).
But Tisch’s hands, to a large extent, are still cuffed — even with de Blasio out and Adams, a former cop, in charge of the NYPD.
That’s because she’s been big-footed by the policies of Bragg, who refuses to fully prosecute criminals like David Mazariegos as violent felons.
Horrible data
Meanwhile, Teuta Dedvukaj of Fox Business uncovered proof that even the “good” crime stats are actually horrible, crunching other data on the NYPD website for “reported” acts of murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary and grand larceny.
They actually rose every year between 2020 and 2023.
Even with the decline in 2024, crime is still significantly higher than it was in 2013, the last year Mike Bloomberg was mayor that marked the beginning of the end of Rudy Giuliani’s crime crackdown.
With the Maoist, cop-hating Zohran Mamdani poised to bring back the bad old days in full as NYC mayor, look for further increases in crime, more people leaving NYC, and more evidence that the Democratic Party is out of touch with reality.
