Last month President Biden announced his plans to help cities fight crime. Specifically, he wants to see cities put more funding behind police as a way to deal with the ongoing surge of shootings and homicides. Today, Biden met with police chiefs in order to further that effort:

During the meeting at the White House, Biden encouraged communities to use the $350 billion for states included in the Covid-19 relief plan passed by Congress in March to hire police officers and put in place new crime prevention programs, and said he wanted to hear from local leaders directly about what the federal government can do.

There’s a very clear political angle to this effort. Defund the police is a political loser and Democrats are worried their past statements of support will create an opening for Republicans in 2022. So Biden is doing his best to publicly drag the party away from that message:

One of Biden’s weakest areas in recent polling has been his handling of crime, with just 38 percent of people approving of the job he is doing in that area and 48 percent disapproving, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released this month…

…the White House has been working in recent weeks to distance Biden from the “defund the police” movement that some Democrats have embraced, increasingly arguing that it is Republicans who support cutting police funding, citing their opposition to the Covid-19 relief bill and past efforts to cut a federal program for police hiring.

This is smart politics. Someone at the White House has been reading the polls instead of taking calls from far-left activists. They’ve realized this could really hurt Democrats at the polls next year unless they get far away from it. So, despite the fact that policing is basically a local issue, Biden is trying to garner national attention for a refund the police message.

The problem for Biden is that he’s simultaneously trying to not irritate progressives who still want to see police defunded. So what he’s doing is talking a lot about gun control which is an easy sell with the base even though it’s likely not the reason crime is up.

So what is the real reason?

That remains a topic of discussion among various criminologists and experts but today LA Magazine spoke with the former head of the LAPD’s COMPSTAT division and he has a pretty clear idea of what is behind the increase of violent crime:

Captain Paul Vernon ran the Los Angeles Police Department’s COMPSTAT division until this past April. Vernon spent much of 2020 trying to figure out what was behind the rise in killings. Some were quick to blame the spike on COVID. But, says Vernon, homicides and aggravated assaults were up in the first two months of 2020, before the pandemic took hold in the U.S. When stay-at-home orders were issued in March, there was a large drop in property crime, accompanied by a smaller drop in violent crime.

Then, in May, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, triggering protests across the country. And for reasons that are now the subject of some debate, Floyd’s death marked an inflection point; in its aftermath, killings surged in most American cities. The murder rate in Milwaukee nearly doubled. Washington, D.C. saw a 64 percent increase in homicides. Murders in Philadelphia hit a 30-year high…

Why the sudden rise in gun violence? Vernon’s theory is one promulgated by a number of U.S. police departments: decreased police presence in high-crime areas. Some of this was by design. In October 2019, the LAPD announced that its Metropolitan Division, a group of 200 officers, would stop pulling over random drivers after a Los Angeles Times investigation found that traffic stops were disproportionately targeting Black drivers. And, indeed, traffic stops were down 27 percent in 2020.

But Vernon says the decrease in police presence was also due to another, more organic reason. “If you’re going to call the police ‘racist,’ if you’re going to call for the defunding of the police and stigmatize the police, there’s gonna be a natural pullback from the police,” he says. “Police are not going to be as proactive in making stops—in initiating activity—if they believe the result of that is going to be them getting fired or being called a racist.”

Again, that’s still considered controversial so you won’t hear President Biden or any other Democrat making that case because it would be completely cutting off the BLM activists who pushed the defund movement. Biden is trying to help Democrats refund police without admitting that the calls for defunding had any negative consequences. The media won’t press him to square that circle by rebuking the activists who may in fact be responsible for the current surge in crime.