Bloodshed, Bedlam, Squalor and Worse

In yesterday’s post, “Unreality in the Streets of DC,” Steven Taylor expressed his concern about the authoritarian nature of President Trump’s announcement that he was federalizing the DC police and that, in doing so, he was “propagating myths about urban areas and how crime-infested they are.” In the first comment on the post, @Joe observed that, “I encounter plenty of people from my own city, let alone smaller towns, who live in absolute fear of big cities because of what they have read but never experienced.”

I think that’s right. That was certainly my impression of places like New York, Chicago, and DC from afar. Having been to the first two of those cities many times and worked in the last for years, it’s wildly overblown.

Here’s what Trump, who spent most of his life living in New York City, said yesterday:

Something’s out of control, but we’re going to put it in control very quickly like we did on the southern border. I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse. 

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And you people are victims of it too. You know, you’re reporters. And I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side, but you don’t want to get — you don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened. And so, you can be any — anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets. You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now.

The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth, much higher. This is much higher. The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years and the number of carjackings has more than tripled. 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. Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore.

It’s almost comically exaggerated, much like the much-lampooned “They’re eating our dogs” spiel from the presidential debates. And, yet, I have no doubt that a huge swatch of the country is cheering the crackdown.

While our cities are by no means crime-infested hellholes, most have a major problem with homelessness. At the very least, there’s something unsettling of having to walk around homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks at all hours of the day or being unable to use the public parks because they’ve been taken over as homeless encampments. Even Democratic mayors have started cracking down—with the permission of the US Supreme Court.

I took to RealClearPolitics to see how those on the right are reacting. Sure enough, it’s playing well.

The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York (“Why Trump is right on DC crime“):

The main argument of Trump’s critics is that violent crime in Washington is going down, so there is no reason for Trump to take over the MPD or call in the National Guard or direct federal law enforcement to the city’s streets. It is true that violent crime statistics are going down, although there have been questions about the accuracy of the police department’s crime reporting. But the undeniable fact is that crime is going down from some very high levels during the pandemic. Plus, just because the incidence of a particular crime is down from last year does not mean it is low today.

In any event, crime remains a serious, quality-of-life-changing issue in the district. In 2023, a bad year for crime in the district, there were 40 murders per 100,000 residents. In 2024, that number fell to 27 per 100,000. So is that good? It is certainly a positive thing to have fewer murders, but 27 per 100,000 is still quite a lot. In fact, according to figures compiled by the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Public Safety Initiatives, the homicide rate of 27 per 100,000 is the fourth-highest among U.S. cities.

In raw numbers from the MPD, the city had 274 murders in 2023, followed by 187 murders in 2024. Now, in 2025, if current trends continue, it appears the district might be headed for around 170 murders. So you can look at it two ways: One, it’s good that murders might go down from 187 last year to 170 this year, or two, 170 murders is still a lot.

Beyond homicide and other violent crime, there’s no doubt that a sense of just-below-the-surface danger and disorder keeps many district residents in a state of unease. One of the reasons Trump decided to act was the attack on a former official in the Department of Government Efficiency effort, Edward Coristine, who was badly beaten in an attempted carjacking in the city. After the Coristine attack, Trump pledged to federalize law enforcement in the district.

Of course, the Coristine beating was not unusual. Events like it caused the city to impose a curfew on young people this summer. That is evidence enough that a city has a crime problem. But a recent Washington Post story added this: “Hours after Coristine was attacked, residents in a nearby block were rattled awake by shouting on their usually quiet, tree-lined street. One person described peeking out their window and seeing a rowdy crowd of youngsters, some in masks. Later, they saw a young man, beaten and bloodied.”

Police came and could not find any suspects or the young beating victim, either. That was another crime that will not go into the statistics. Then more from the Post: “The weekend’s incident unnerved residents. … ‘This is a safe city, but overhearing and witnessing gang threats and then watching the camera footage of the thuggery is disturbing,’ said one resident, speaking on the condition of anonymity over concerns of personal safety. The crowd of teens, he said, was roaming the street and appeared to be checking for unlocked cars and things to steal.”

On the one hand, the resident said the city is safe. On the other hand, he did not feel safe enough to speak on the record. What kind of safety is that?

UnHerd’s Emily Jashinsky (“How crime shattered DC: The US capital needed an intervention“):

Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the centre of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”

This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.

Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties  and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week. 

The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.

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Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”

In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offences outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offences district-wide.”

Just days later, the Navy Yard neighbourhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighbourhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorisation — for lack of a better word — of our neighbourhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”

Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.” 

This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the run-up to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.” 

In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.

Even the establishment WSJ Editorial Board (“Donald Trump, D.C. Police Commissioner: Cleaning up the city is a worthy task, and local control is dysfunctional.“) joins in:

Mr. Trump’s opponents are in the awkward position of arguing it’s no emergency if last year a mere 187 people were murdered and only 1,026 were assaulted with a dangerous weapon.

By getting involved in D.C. governance, Mr. Trump is setting a precedent, and the next Democratic President could follow it, with other priorities. Yet Republicans might still consider that an improvement on the status quo. At least the White House is sensitive to national opinion, which is larger than the progressive voter base that elects the D.C. City Council.

Recall that President Biden signed a Congressional resolution in 2023, amid that year’s murder surge, to overturn the D.C. City Council’s revisions to its criminal code, which included a reduction in the maximum penalties for carjacking and illegal gun possession. The vote in Congress included dozens of Democratic ayes. One was Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig, who had been assaulted in an elevator at her D.C. apartment building. Another was Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who later that year was carjacked at gunpoint.

On the whole, local control of D.C. looks like a failure. The city has enshrined noncitizen voting in local elections and “sanctuary” policies to thwart federal immigration enforcement. Why should the President and Congress stand for this in America’s seat of government?

Mr. Trump loves to cast himself as a man of action, and now he’s top cop. If he really helps to clean up D.C., clearing out homeless camps and making public spaces safer for residents and tourists, he’ll deserve thanks.

I’d note that all three acknowledge that the crime rate is indeed down from the high Trump cited. Jashinsky went further, noting that much of the city is actually thriving and a nice place to live and work. Yet they all welcome the crackdown.

The Atlantic‘s Quinta Jurecic, who is decidedly not on the right, paints the early actions of the deployed feds in a comical light.

So far, however, the surge in law enforcement—which began a few days ago, before this morning’s announcement—appears mostly farcical. Footage from WUS9, a local news station, showed a pack of Drug Enforcement Administration agents lumbering awkwardly along the Mall in bulletproof vests as joggers streaked past. (For those unfamiliar with D.C., the Mall—a green expanse frequented by tourists and ice-cream trucks—is not exactly a hotbed of crime, especially on a sunny summer morning.) Near my quiet neighborhood in D.C.’s Northwest quadrant, federal officers have been patrolling a tiny park whose chief menace, in my experience, has been the occasional abandoned chicken bone scarfed down by my dog. Over the weekend, I watched a Secret Service car drive slowly in circles around my block. At first I assumed that the agents had gotten lost.

But even illusory crackdowns on crime are popular. Those of us of a certain age remember President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which famously funded “his goal of putting 100,000 police on America’s streets.” A quarter century later, Kamala Harris criticized Joe Biden for his role in its passage in the Democratic debates. But it was wildly popular at the time and the Clinton Foundation was still crowing about it on the 20th anniversary.