Winston-Salem ranks No. 14 on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) recently released list of the top 30 cities with high crime rates. The list has come under scrutiny following President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime in Washington, DC.
“You look at Chicago, how bad it is,” said Trump earlier this month, according to Newsweek. “You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore there.”
The cities that made the FBI’s top 30 list had at least 100,000 residents and had the highest number of violent crimes per 100,000 people.
Jon Guze, senior fellow of legal studies at the John Locke Foundation, said it’s no surprise that crime in the District of Columbia has dropped sharply following Trump’s National Guard deployment. He said studies of policing tactics have shown that visible law enforcement discourages criminal activity.
The John Locke Foundation has long argued for putting more police officers in high-crime neighborhoods. But staffing levels have been moving in the opposite direction in recent years — especially in the communities that need more officers due to accelerating crime.
“Winston Salem is a prime example of a community that badly needs more police officers on the streets, but it is not alone,” Guze told the Carolina Journal. “Crime rates in Durham, Fayetteville, and Greensboro are also much higher than in the rest of the state. In fact, when it comes to murder, they have generally been worse than Winston-Salem. We need to find a way to put more police officers on the streets in all four cities.”
Whether the president can — or should — send in the National Guard is a different question, according to Guze. The District of Columbia falls under federal authority, but North Carolina’s cities do not. Unless the governor makes a request, or there is an extreme situation such as an insurrection or natural disaster, the president does not have the authority to deploy federal troops in the states.
According to the latest Carolina Journal Poll, 63.2% of voters are concerned about neighborhood crime and safety. Of those, only 23.8% were very concerned, 39.5% were somewhat concerned, and 35.3% were not concerned at all.
Black voters were also the most heavily concerned about crime in their neighborhood, according to poll results. Nearly 68% of black voters said they were concerned about crime. Of those, 38.5% said they were “very” concerned.
Voters were asked to select the three types of crime that they were most concerned about. Traffic safety was at the top of the list (46%), followed by drug-related issues (43.4%), property crime (36.1%), cybersecurity threats (27.8%), violent crime (25.8%), police-community relations (20.2%), and gang activity (12%).
