Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s pledge to make America’s streets safer is nonsense, opponent Hillary Clinton has insisted. Why, the nation already is safe, she explains.

Let us give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she just was not aware of an upsurge in violent crime.

FBI officials know about it, however. On Monday the agency’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program released a report that the number of murders reported by local law enforcement officials last year was up more than 10 percent from 2014.

Overall, violent offenses of all sorts increased by 3.9 percent from 2014 to 2015, the FBI noted.

Violent crime had been decreasing in the United States. As FBI officials hastened to note, the 2015 statistics still show lower rates of offenses such as murder, assault, etc., than five and 10 years ago.

But as Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted during an event in Arkansas, "we still have much work to do."

Indeed we do. Now, the focus should be on whether last year’s numbers were part of a trend or merely a one-year blip.

Beyond any reasonable doubt, one thing that has changed is the attitude of many toward law enforcement officers. Not since the 1960s and early 1970s have Americans heard shouts from crowds such as the shameful, "What do we want? Dead cops now," chants that have been in the news recently.

Obviously, incompetent, evil police officers need to be held accountable. But they are a minuscule fraction of the total number of dedicated officers and deputies serving and protecting us. Those men and women deserve our trust – and we need them, badly.

Discounting the importance of law and order as Clinton has done clearly is a mistake.

– The Jamestown Post-Journal

Newsletter