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When President Donald Trump sent the Washington, D.C., National Guard and other federal law enforcement to police the streets of the district this August, a New York Times reporter declared it “a nonexistent crime crisis.” Liberal journalists all rallied behind the idea that Washington was perfectly safe and clean.
Trump then declared that he had basically eliminated violent crime from the city, and his administration said they planned to deploy federal law enforcement to the streets of other Democrat-run cities. This spurred a new counterargument from Democrats: red states are actually more dangerous than blue states.
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There’s plenty to debate here, regarding federalism, D.C. home rule, political prudence, and law-enforcement tactics. But that debate is impossible while the politicians, the media, and the public all seem to be starting from different sets of facts.
So what’s the truth about crime in the district and in other cities? How bad is it, how is it trending, and where is it worst?
DC crime
“Bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” Trump said in his oration on D.C. “Violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”
Is Trump’s picture accurate? Or is Peter Baker correct that there is no crime problem in D.C.?
Well, it depends on your benchmark.
D.C. is much more violent and criminal than most of the country.
In D.C. last year there was 1 violent crime per every 100 people, or to use the measurement the FBI uses, about 1,000 violent crimes per 100,000 population. That rate puts D.C. in the top-ten most violent cities and is more than two-and-a-half the violent crime rate in the rest of the country (359 violent crimes per 100,000 people).
Likewise, D.C.’s property crime rate is more than double that in the rest of the country.
D.C.’s 2024 murder rate of 27.3 homicides per 100,000 population was six times that of New York City, and was the fourth highest among U.S. cities.
Carjackings are a very popular crime in the D.C. area, especially since the COVID lockdowns. Most carjackings in D.C. and the surrounding areas are by children and teenagers, many of whom simply go for joyrides and then crash the car. This is a clear fallout from the decision of local leaders to close the public schools for a year and ban organized recreational activity.
In 2023, D.C. saw nearly 950 carjackings, and in 2024 that number fell massively to 496 — only about 10 per week.
Some longtime D.C. residents don’t think this is too bad, because things used to be a lot worse. From 1990 to 1993, back when Democrats were running as tough-on-crime, D.C. experienced almost 500 murders a year — more than 9 per week.
The murder rate steadily fell for about thirty years, and D.C. — slowly at first, and then rapidly in the late aughts and early 2010s — became a safer, cleaner, and more attractive place to live and hang out.
In 2012, only 88 people were murdered in D.C., representing a drop of more than 80%.
D.C.’s improvement reversed in 2014 — the year black teenager Michael Brown was killed after attacking a Ferguson police officer. Then, of course, the police killing George Floyd, the subsequent riots, the resulting police retreat, and the lockdowns and school closures.
D.C.’s Floyd/lockdown crime wave peaked around 2022 or 2023, depending on the measure, and the first half of 2025 showed a continued downward trend. Still, many crime figures are higher than they were before the pandemic, and just about everything is worse than it was before 2014.
As of Sept. 4, D.C. has had 104 murders in 2025, more than the total in 2012, and about equal to its annual total in the surrounding years.
D.C. had 1,742 violent crimes in the first 8 months of the year, which is much worse than in pre-COVID times. Back in 1997 was the last time, before the lockdowns, that there were so many violent crimes in D.C.
So is D.C. safer than it was the last few years? Yes. But it’s much more dangerous than it was for most of the past three decades.
A final note on D.C. Part of what residents and workers in D.C. find so upsetting is the general disorder: bike theft, metro turnstile hopping, car break-ins, homeless encampments, and the ubiquitous smell of marijuana, to name a few.
These are the sort of things that liberal commentators say are no big deal, but that make life unpleasant, particularly for women, children, and parents.
Other cities
In 2021, former NYPD officer Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor, defeating multiple progressives who had advocated defunding the police. You could predict how well he would do in any given precinct based on the violent crime rate: The safest corners of Manhattan and Brooklyn supported the defund the police candidates — that is, they held luxury beliefs.
The most dangerous parts of the city voted for Adams. If you were exposed to crime, you wanted someone to come in and bust heads.
New York recovered pretty quickly from its Floyd/lockdown crime surge (even if the subways took a little longer to improve).
NYC murders in 2024 were down 20% from 2021 highs, but were still higher than any of the seven years before COVID. Likewise, all serious felonies are down from the 2022 highs, but still higher than any year between 2006 and 2020.
Other major cities generally show the same trends, down from recent peaks but still historically high.
Baltimore may be the exception. The city had a massive post-Ferguson spike in murders, exacerbated by their own version of Ferguson. (A black arrestee named Freddie Gray died in the back of a police van in 2015, and an ambitious Democratic prosecutor failed to convict the cops.)
But murders have fallen rapidly since 2022, and last month was the least deadly August in Baltimore in decades.
Trump administration officials have suggested that he will “liberate” Chicago. Trump likewise called Los Angeles “lawless.”
Again, there are debates over the legality and prudence of Trump sending federal law enforcement to police these cities, but underlying this debate is the question of whether they have a public safety crisis.
Chicago has plenty of crime and plenty of bad neighborhoods, but as a whole, it is not one of the more violent cities. It is not in the top 20 in murder rate, and its murder rate is half of Baltimore’s.
Democratic politicians and the New York Times have responded to Trump’s attacks on Chicago and LA by saying Republican-run states are more dangerous.
Red state cities
Birmingham, St. Louis, and Memphis are the three deadliest cities, measured by murders per capita. That these are all cities in red states is a source of smirking pleasure for the news media. (All three, though, have Democratic mayors.)
When Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) criticized the homeless problems and the immigration riots in Los Angeles, California Gov. Gavin Newsom — a Democrat who wants to run for president in 2028 — has fired back that both states have higher crime rates than his.
Louisiana, the home state of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), is also coming under scrutiny for its high crime.
These Democratic retorts are true.
Louisiana’s murder rate is 7.9, Arkansas’s is 7.2, and Oklahoma’s sits at 6.2 — all higher than California’s 4.2 or New York’s 2.6.
Likewise, the largest cities in these states — New Orleans, Little Rock, and Oklahoma City — all have higher murder rates than LA or NYC, by a lot.
Why? It’s hard to say, except that southern cities are much more segregated, creating more neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, fatherlessness, and general disorder. Also, Los Angeles and New York City have massive pockets of wealth — both extremely rich areas and upper-middle-class neighborhoods — that drive down the per-capita crime rates.
Different ways of measuring crime and safety turn up different results.
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For instance, one recent study found that the three most dangerous neighborhoods were all in LA, and No. 4 was in San Francisco.
So there are many ways to slice all the data on crime in U.S. cities. The fairest way to summarize it would be this: Crime in D.C., like crime in other major U.S. cities, has fallen dramatically in the last two years, but it still higher than it was 12 or 15 years ago — and this is true in both Republican and Democratic states.