Justice & Law Quote by Alan Mollohan

Numbers are doing politics here, not just reporting reality. Mollohan’s line stages a familiar Washington maneuver: take a broad social trend (crime fell through the 1990s), place it beside a signature federal initiative (Clinton-era COPS), and let proximity do the argumentative heavy lifting. The phrase "nearly coincides" is the tell. It’s cautious enough to avoid a hard causation claim, but suggestive enough to plant one in the listener’s mind. Correlation as insinuation.

The specific intent is transactional: defend or expand a federal program by wrapping it in a decade’s worth of public relief. In the late 1990s, falling crime became a kind of bipartisan trophy, but Democrats in particular needed a proof point that they could be "tough" and "smart" on crime without simply defaulting to punitive escalation. COPS - hiring officers, funding community strategies - offered a feel-good, locally legible story: more presence, more trust, fewer shootings.

The subtext is about credit and legitimacy. If the decline "nearly" tracks the program, then the program deserves protection from budget cutters and skeptics, and the party behind it deserves narrative ownership of safety. It’s also a hedge against the messy reality that crime drops have multiple drivers (demographics, economics, incarceration, policing tactics, even environmental factors). Mollohan’s sentence quietly acknowledges that complexity while still steering the audience toward a preferred conclusion: keep the money flowing, because it worked - or at least, it happened when things got better.