Note to President Trump: No, 2% of the population doesn’t account for all crime

Crime is more complex than the president claims. Pinning blame on a tiny subset of the population is rhetorically useful, but both crime and criminalization are widespread in the U.S.

by Wanda Bertram, September 15, 2026

President Trump has been claiming lately that 2 percent of the U.S. population accounts for all or almost all crime in the United States. When asked to back up these claims, the White House cites our research showing that 5.6 million people — about 2 percent of the population — are booked into local jails every year.

It will shock few people to hear that this claim is bogus.

Here, we explain why that is and the numerous problems with equating jail bookings with crime. We also discuss the complex social causes of crime that Trump fails to engage with, when he opts to pile blame on a small imaginary group that he says should be incarcerated or banished.

Jail bookings are not directly representative of crime

Trump seems to think that to find out who is committing crime, one can simply look at who is getting arrested. But arrests do not equate to crime. Instead, arrests reflect police decision-making around who to bring to jail. The vast majority of arrests are for low-level offenses, and many people booked in jail are never charged or have their cases dismissed days or weeks later.

Police may bring someone to jail without any intention of them facing criminal charges, like people jailed in order to “sober up,” those arrested for a suspected violation of supervision rules, or people held on material witness warrants. By the same token, many people enter the criminal legal system without ever going to jail. About 13 million people every year pass through the U.S.’s bloated, bureaucratic misdemeanor system, facing punishments like fines and fees even while many are never arrested.

It’s also true that many crimes never lead to someone spending time in jail. Many categories of crimes are underreported. Some major social harms, such as worker and tenant abuse, routinely go unresolved, and when they are addressed, it is usually outside of criminal court. Even among reported crimes, many are never solved or never even lead to an arrest, as indicated by low police clearance rates nationwide.

Crime and criminalization extend far beyond 5.6 million people

In a speech in July, Trump stated that “there’s a statistic that’s incredible. Two percent of the people create 91 percent of the crime.” He continued, “You can handle two percent of the people. We get them out. We get them out.”

It’s clear why Trump wants it to be true that a tiny slice of the population accounts for the vast majority of crime. It’s easy to “other-ize” an imagined handful of super-criminals, whom a general audience can assume have no connection to them or their families.

But the reality of mass incarceration shows us that this isn’t the case. 79 million people in this country (or almost a quarter of the national population) have a criminal record, and of those, 19 million have a felony record. Just as most people are likely to know someone who has been the victim of a crime, most people have some connection to someone who has gone to jail. In fact, as FWD.us has reported, nearly one in every two adults in the U.S. has an immediate family member who has been to prison or jail.

None of this has stopped the Trump administration, however, from acting as though crime is a simple matter that can be fixed by replacing social welfare programs and violence prevention with harsher policing.

Reductive views of crime make social problems worse

What is true about people booked in jails is that they are deeply disadvantaged. As our research from 2019 shows, people in jails are disproportionately poor, unemployed, struggling with physical and mental illness, and lacking health insurance. A smaller subset of this group, who are booked in jails multiple times a year (typically for nonviolent offenses), are even more likely to be low-income and unhoused.

Making living conditions worse for this segment of the population, and ripping away programs that gave them more stability, has unfortunately been a cornerstone of Trump’s second term. The president has axed federal grants for crime prevention programs totaling almost a billion dollars, canceled thousands of grants for mental health and substance use treatment, and decimated funding for permanent supportive housing. Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid will likely reverse public safety gains and is already hurting reentry programs designed to prevent recidivism.

Under these circumstances, crime and social disorder are likely to get worse, not better. And as many states backslide into punitive “tough-on-crime” policies, like restricting good time credits and parole, it’s worth remembering that harsh punishments may in fact cause more crime. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, policies like mandatory minimums and habitual offender laws — locking people up and throwing away the key — have no demonstrable public safety benefit.

The system, not the people, is the problem

Trump may be hoping that pinning crime on a small, imaginary slice of the population will rationalize making the criminal legal system harsher and defunding sources of support. But crime is more complicated, and the policies he — and many other lawmakers — are pushing are a prescription for backsliding into the worst days of mass incarceration.

These data also highlight an inevitable conclusion: In a nation where nearly a quarter of the population has a criminal record, the problem isn’t its people. The problem is the system.