FBI data shows that President Donald Trump has helped save more than 1,000 lives by reversing the crime wave that emerged amid President Barack Obama’s crackdown on state and local police forces.

Nationwide, homicides spiked to 15,195 in 2016, up from 12,278 murders in 2014 when Obama and his progressive and media allies began blaming police forces for multiple episodes in which young black men were killed.

Since then, Trump has ended the White House support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the number of murders was forced down to 14,123 in 2018, according to new FBI data. The murder rate dropped by 6.8 percent from 2017 to 2018.

The combined reduction in murders in 2017 and 2018 adds up to roughly 1,318 Americans who did not die from murder since Obama’s departure in early 2017. The savings amount to approximately two fewer dead each day. A large percentage of the people who did not die are African-American.

If Obama had kept the murder rate at the 2014 level, 9,304 Americans would not have been murdered from 2015 to 2018.

Overall, the violent crime rate fell by 3.3 percent from 2017 to 2018, after rising by 4.7 percent from 2014.

The violent crime rate is down nine percent from 2009, despite Obama’s crime increase.

The FBI data provides details about national arrests and city arrests by race and ethnic group. But the FBI did not provide easy access to data about the number of white, black, or Latino victims.

In late 2017, crime expert Heather McDonald blamed the extra dead on the Democrats’ “Black Lives Matter” campaign to stigmatize and regulate cops. The campaign began when Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder intervened in the 2014 Ferguson riots, shortly before the 2014 midterm elections.

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed” … The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it. Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons, according to a Pew Research poll released in January 2016. The reason is the persistent anti-cop climate.

Local police chiefs and former FBI Director James Comey also complained about the political and media pressure on street cops. “I don’t know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” James Comey in a 2015 speech at the University of Chicago Law School.

“We have allowed our Police Department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence,” Chicago’s Democratic Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said during an October 2015 event. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact,” he added.

“The media, academia, and some police officials are again twisting themselves into knots to deny that de-policing is responsible for the ongoing violent-crime increase,” McDonald reported. She continued:

The strong version of what I have called the Ferguson Effect—a drop in proactive policing leading to rising crime—is the only explanation for the crime increase that matches the data. The country has just elected a new president who understands that the false narrative about the police has led to the breakdown of law and order in inner cities. If the crime situation improves in the coming year, it will be because Black Lives Matter calumnies no longer have an echo chamber in the White House and because cops on the beat believe that they will now be supported for trying to restore order where informal social control has broken down.

Read the FBI data here and here.