Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsTrump's policies on refugees are as simple as ABCs Ocasio-Cortez, Velázquez call for convention to decide Puerto Rico status White House officials voted by show of hands on 2018 family separations: report MORE on Tuesday touted what he said was President Trump Donald John TrumpUS reimposes UN sanctions on Iran amid increasing tensions Jeff Flake: Republicans 'should hold the same position' on SCOTUS vacancy as 2016 Trump supporters chant 'Fill that seat' at North Carolina rally MORE's kept promise to clamp down on violent crime, after the FBI released preliminary data showing a plunge in violent crime in the first half of 2017.

In an op-ed published by USA Today, Sessions proclaimed that the Trump administration had reversed a trend of increasing violent crime in the U.S.

"Trump ran for office on a message of law and order, and he won," he wrote. "When he took office, he ordered the Department of Justice to stop and reverse these trends — and that is what we have been doing every day for the past year."

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The Trump administration, Sessions said, had "placed trust" in federal prosecutors that had gone by the wayside under the Obama administration, and had "invested in new resources and put in place smarter policies based on sound research."

Sessions pointed to an increase in the violent crime rate in 2015 and 2016, saying that the Trump administration had ended that trend.

The op-ed came as the FBI released preliminary statistics showing that both violent and property crime rates fell during the first half of last year.

The data showed a continuation of a decades-long trend of decreasing crime rates. According to that data, violent crime decreased by just under a percentage point in the first six months of 2017, compared with the same time in 2016. Property crimes fell by nearly 3 percentage points in the same period.

The murder rate, according to the FBI data, actually rose by 1.5 percentage points in the first six months of last year.