By ordering a zealous crackdown on crime and new “blue lives matter” protections for police officers on Thursday, Donald Trump made an ostentatious break with Barack Obama’s reformist agenda on criminal justice.

Less than two years after Obama’s White House taskforce on 21st century policing urged officers to “embrace a guardian – rather than a warrior – mindset”, Trump said that he would be convening his own taskforce to help send police back into battle.

While that panel explores new legislation to enhance “public safety”, Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has also been asked to devise “new crimes of violence” that would make assaults against police punishable with severe sentences.

Trump vows law and order crackdown to combat 'menace' of crime Read more

Trump said in an order signed on Thursday that his administration plans to “define new federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing federal crimes, in order to prevent violence” against officers, and would pursue “new mandatory minimum sentences” for those who break the new laws.

The president’s plan, which echoes so-called “blue lives matter” bills from conservative state legislators, represents a sharp about-turn from the moderately progressive proposals issued by the Obama administration amid unrest over the fatal shooting of African American men by police officers in the past two years.

Civil liberties campaigners denounced Trump’s order as an unnecessary move that could lead to drastic penalties for offenses such as resisting arrest.

While police face “unique hardships” due to the nature of their work, Amnesty International said in a statement: “Authorities are already able to vigorously prosecute crimes against law enforcement officers, and there is no history to suggest that officers are not fully protected by current laws.”

But Trump has shown himself to be as unbothered by the lessons of history as by the bounds of factual present reality. And so, the orders he signed after swearing in Sessions at the White House revived his apocalyptic campaign theme of a country under siege by criminals, which is contradicted by official data.

One order said that foreign criminal gangs had “spread throughout the nation” displaying a “wanton disregard for human life” and had “been known to commit brutal murders, rapes, and other barbaric acts”. Another stated: “Many communities across the nation are suffering from high rates of violent crime.”

In fact, crime in the US remains relatively low by modern historical standards and had been steadily declining for years before the recent uptick in violent crime that Sessions on Thursday nonsensically described as a “permanent trend”. Earlier this week, Trump repeated a lie that the US murder rate, which is roughly half as great as it was in 1980, is actually at a 47-year high.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that Trump was targeting “national trends that don’t exist” while ignoring growing problems such as the excessive use of force against black people by police officers.

“We have seen historic lows in the country’s crime rate and a downward trend in killings against police officers since the 1980s,” said Jeffery Robinson, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.

Still, Trump’s executive orders will undoubtedly delight the rank-and-file members of the national Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s biggest law enforcement union, which endorsed Trump after accusing Obama of demonizing them.

Earlier this month, the group expressed its joy at the Senate judiciary committee’s approval of Sessions for the job of attorney general, saying he was “a real advocate for the men and women in law enforcement”. Unspoken, but clear, was their view that Obama and his attorneys general had by contrast sided with the protesters.

Trump has also excited officers by promising to resume supplying police departments with heavy weaponry and vehicles that have been discarded by the Pentagon. Obama ordered restrictions on the program amid widespread concern about the use of such equipment against protests and riots on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

Another order on Thursday, on general crime-fighting, directed Sessions to establish the “task force on crime reduction and public safety”, which will identify “deficiencies” in existing laws and propose new legislation “that could be enacted to improve public safety and reduce crime”.

The panel will also be responsible for reviewing all “crime-related data” and for finding “measures that could improve data collection” to help reduce crime, according to the order.

But exactly what kind of “improvements” to the data would be welcomed by this president, whose campaign suggested that the FBI’s official crime statistics should not be trusted, remains unclear.