While Washington D.C. isn’t quite the dystopian hellhole depicted by President Donald Trump, there’s little denying that the city is on a downward trajectory.
Longtime visitors to D.C.’s Union Station will sense things are getting worse immediately, and it doesn’t improve when they get outside. More litter, graffiti, homelessness, drug addicts, and begging. The invasive and threatening behavior is creeping into tourist spots and upscale neighborhoods. It’s as if the early 90s are coming back, and I don’t say that with even a hint of nostalgia. There will always be a degree of criminal activity in city centers, but it’s far worse now than it was before the pandemic. And a lot of the change isn’t quantifiable.
When Trump announced he was mobilizing 800 National Guardsmen to bring order to the city, defenders of D.C., like Chief White House correspondent for the New York Times Peter Baker, argued that the deployment was in reaction to “nonexistent crime crisis” because crime is at a 30-year low. Considering Washington was known as the “murder capital” of the country, congratulations for the improvement.
I’ve written numerous times on the destructive romanticism for the 1970s and 1980s among young people. Most cities are in far better shape after gentrification and enhanced policing helped turn them around. That doesn’t mean they’re great. It doesn’t mean those who live in them right now should be subjected to criminality.
As it stands, DC has some of the highest crime rates in the United States, especially in the minority neighborhoods that most political media types would never set foot in. D.C.’s homicide rate is higher than Chicago’s or Atlanta’s or New York’s. If the Left got its wish, and D.C. became a state, it would overtake Mississippi with the highest murder rate in the nation.
You could almost hear the stampede of factcheckers opening Wikipedia on their laptops after the president declared the murder rate in D.C. was higher than that of Bogotá, Colombia or Mexico City. On a per capita basis, he’s right. In 2023, there were 274 homicides in Washington, before falling last year. Latvia has by far the highest per capita homicide rate in Europe at around 4 per 100,000 (I was also surprised). The D.C. murder rate is 26.6 per 100,000 in 2024. That doesn’t mean most of us would prefer Bogotá or Riga to Georgetown, but it’s a “crisis” for many people.
Moreover, the situation is probably worse than the stats, which can be juked.
Trump often claims that statistics he dislikes are “fake,” the most recent example being the BLS job numbers. But, in this case, there are legitimate concerns about D.C.’s numbers. In many cities, progressive prosecutors will downgrade violent felonies into misdemeanors to create fake reductions on paper in serious crime. In D.C., for example, a “simple assault,” which seems to be a favorite designation for plain-old regular assault, doesn’t show up as a “violent crime.” The police union officials have spent years claiming there is systemic manipulation by their superiors to undercount the FBI crime reporting. One D.C. police commander is on administrative leave while an investigation in the potential manipulation of stats is ongoing.
Moreover, crime stats do not measure the homeless enactments or mentally ill and drug addicted people that wander the streets, often making life unpleasant for residents. That is a major quality of life issue.
Yet, elected Democrats are running around the country telling voters that crime isn’t a problem. Why do they fall for it every time?
Non-violent crime is a compounding problem. The Broken Window’s theory employed by New York and other cities in the 90s was predicated on the idea that ignoring disorder and petty offenses fosters an environment in which more serious crime grows. On this front, one of the in D.C. is that young men are running around intimidating people. They apparently feel completely free to do so. Edward Coristine, better known as Big Balls of DOGE fame, was recently accosted and then beaten up by a group of teens in Dupont Circle, not exactly the slums.
Most of the things these petty criminals are doing isn’t showing up in any stat. In recent years carjackings have spiked in Washington, often by young people. In one infamous incident in 2021, two teenage girls, ages 13 and 15, killed a 66-year-old UberEats driver. Criminality can devolve quickly when unchecked.
Take 1986, when there were 194 murders in D.C., fewer per capita than in 2024. By 1989, though, there were 434 murders in the District, rising for the next five years straight. By 1991 there were 482, or 80.6 homicides per 100,000 people. The warning for this trend appeared in early 80s, when less violent criminality continued to inch up. Once you lose control of the city, it’s difficult to regain it.
Rather than offer some tempered criticism of Trump’s declaring another emergency — the administration declares emergencies seemingly weekly — the left decided to act as if crime isn’t a genuine problem for millions. Progressive MSNBC guest Anand Giridharadas says he’s more afraid of “losing my vote and climate change than getting mugged in D.C.” This is basically a microcosm of the modern Democrat’s biggest problem: focusing on issues that have no effect on voters while dismissing tangible, real-world problems as frivolous.
Virtually every poll shows that residents disagree with Giridharadas. In one recent poll conducted by the Washington Post, crime was the top concern of most residents (21%). Affordable housing came in second (10%). Black residents, especially black women, are the most concerned with crime. One imagines that if Giridharadas, or others, was compelled walk to work through some of the Southeast sketchy neighborhoods, he’d change his tune. The National Guard deployment is at best a short-term solution and worst political theater, especially if troops are just going to patrol the National Mall or Georgetown. It’s not the tourist spots that need it most. And though normally, I’d say cities have a responsibility to take care of themselves and not be bailed out by federal government simply because they keep electing incompetent ideologues, the federal government has every right to intervene in D.C. The American military, despite perceptions, is barred from carrying out law enforcement. They can merely detain people and hand them over to the District’s Metropolitan Police Department, which Trump has taken control of for 30 days. Considering where the capitol of the United States is headed, maybe federalizing the force would be best for the city.