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 the district’s Union Station have no doubt sensed that things are worsening, and they don’t improve outside; they’re just met with 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 Guard troops to bring order to the city, defenders of the district, such as the New York Times‘s chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, argued that the deployment was in reaction to a “nonexistent crime crisis” because crime is at a 30-year low. Considering Washington, D.C., was known as the “murder capital” of the country, congratulations on the improvement.
I’ve written numerous times on the destructive romanticism of 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, and it doesn’t mean those who live in them right now should be subjected to criminality.
As it stands, Washington, D.C., 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. The district’s homicide rate is higher than Chicago’s, Atlanta’s, or New York’s. If the Left got its wish, and Washington, D.C., became a state, it would overtake Mississippi with the highest murder rate in the nation.
You could almost hear the stampede of fact-checkers opening Wikipedia on their laptops after Trump declared the murder rate in Washington, D.C., is higher than that of Bogotá, Colombia, or Mexico City. On a per capita basis, he’s right. In 2023, there were 274 homicides in the district, before falling last year. Latvia has by far the highest per capita homicide rate in Europe at around four per 100,000 (I was also surprised). In 2024, the Washington, D.C., murder rate was 26.6 per 100,000. 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 says statistics he dislikes are “fake,” the most recent example being the Bureau of Labor Statistics job numbers. But, in this case, there are legitimate concerns about Washington, D.C.’s numbers. In many cities, progressive prosecutors will downgrade violent felonies to misdemeanors to create fake reductions on paper in serious crime. In Washington, 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 district police commander is on administrative leave while an investigation into the possible 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 problem.
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 windows 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 problems in Washington, D.C., is that young men are running around intimidating people. They apparently feel completely free to do so. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer, was recently accosted and beaten up by a group of teenagers in Dupont Circle, which is not exactly the slums.
Most of the things these petty criminals are doing aren’t showing up in any stats. In recent years, carjackings have spiked in the district, often by young people. In one infamous incident in 2021, two teenage girls, ages 13 and 15, killed a 66-year-old Uber Eats driver. Criminality can devolve quickly when unchecked.
Take 1986, when there were 194 murders in Washington, 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 the early 80s, when less violent criminality continued to inch up. Once you lose control of the city, it’s difficult to regain it.
WASHINGTON, DC, IS UNFIT TO EVER BECOME A STATE
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 of people. Progressive MSNBC guest Anand Giridharadas said 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 matters 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, were the most concerned with crime. One imagines that if Giridharadas, or others, were compelled to walk to work through some of the sketchy southeast neighborhoods, he’d change his tune. The National Guard deployment is at best a short-term solution and at 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 the federal government simply because they keep electing incompetent ideologues, the federal government has every right to intervene in Washington, D.C. The U.S. military, despite perceptions, is barred from carrying out law enforcement. It 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 capital of the U.S. is headed, maybe federalizing the force would be best for the city.
