No sooner had Donald Trump ended his rambling 78-minute news conference on Monday to announce that he was sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., to combat “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in the capital, than those feisty fact-checkers – God bless their souls – were on his case, accusing him of misleading the American public.
“The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogotá, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth, much higher,” Mr. Trump declared, announcing that 800 National Guard troops would soon begin patrolling the capital and ordering a 30-day federal takeover of the city’s police force.
“Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years. Can’t be worse,” said Mr. Trump.
Sure enough, the 274 murders that Washington recorded in 2023 was far from the worst-ever number in the city’s recent history. There were more than 480 murders in 1991, when the city counted about 100,000 fewer residents than its current population of about 700,000. The murder rate fell by half from 80 per 100,000 residents in 1991, to about 40 per 100,000 in 2023.
What’s more, the murder rate fell further to 26.6 per 100,000 in 2024, when the District of Columbia recorded 187 murders. Overall, violent crime fell 35 per cent in 2023, and is down 26 per cent so far this year, according to the city’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).
Analysis: Deploying National Guard in Washington endangers decades of district’s near-independence
Still, the fact-checkers miss the point, and often choose their numbers selectively. By no measure can one say that crime in Washington, D.C., is under control. Its murder rate was the fifth-highest in 2024 among U.S. cities over 500,000. Carjackings may be down from 2023, but they are still higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. And Washington’s 2024 murder rate was 13 times Toronto’s rate of 1.9 per 100,000 residents.
Furthermore, as crime expert Jeff Asher noted this week in a Substack post: “Comparing what is being published by D.C. [police] to the numbers being reported to the FBI suggests that the department’s website is overstating the decline in violent crime over the last two years. Violent crime is still declining, but probably not as much as is being reported.”
That does not mean Mr. Trump was justified in calling in the National Guard or federalizing the MPD. The move smacks of quintessentially Trumpian overreach aimed at satisfying his own authoritarian impulses and distracting from the scandal over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which, until National Guard troops showed up this week on the streets of tony Georgetown, had been the preferred topic of the D.C. chattering classes. You must admit Mr. Trump has a knack for pressing the D.C. elite’s buttons.
National Guard troops have no authority to arrest people. While their presence may serve as a deterrent to crime, anecdotal evidence suggests that most troops have been stationed in lower-crime parts of the city, rather than in the high-crime Anacostia neighbourhood.
Trump pledges to evict homeless population from Washington, D.C.
Of Washington, D.C.’s quadrants, the southeast quadrant that includes Anacostia remains a world away from the mansions of Georgetown or the upscale hotels and condos of the northwest.
In recent decades, gentrification has transformed Washington from a majority-Black city – African-Americans accounted for almost 70 per cent of its residents in the 1980s – into one in which white and Black people each make up about 40 per cent of the population. But income inequality is extreme, with Black people earning less than a third of the annual median income of white people. Life expectancy is more than 15 years lower among D.C.’s Black population than among whites, Latinos and Asians. Crime in Black neighbourhoods is a major reason why.
Mr. Trump gets upset by the homeless encampments he sees from his limousine. He wants everywhere – from D.C. to Gaza – to look like one of his golf resorts. The homeless are like so much brush to be cleared out to make way for the greens. He does not see them as equal human beings.
Yet, Mr. Trump’s critics are on the wrong track if they try to accuse him of creating a “phony, manufactured crisis” and exaggerating D.C.’s crime problem. Like so many one-party U.S. cities led by Democratic mayors, the U.S. capital is seen by much of the rest of the country as an example of what happens when law and order take a back seat to virtue-signalling and identity politics. D.C.’s policy of cashless bail – adopted on the pretext that demanding cash reinforces racial disparities – is seen as an invitation to commit crime.
Democratic mayors are not to blame for Mr. Trump’s repugnant authoritarian actions. But they do often seem to provide him with the excuses he seeks to undertake them.