‘Americans don’t feel safe’: Former Dem strategist calls on party to support city crime crackdown

Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine on “The Morning Meeting” Tuesday advised his party to welcome a crackdown on crime in cities following President Donald Trump’s moves to combat violent crime in Washington, D.C.

Trump announced on Monday that he was taking measures — including declaring a “public safety emergency” and deploying the National Guard — to counter violent crime in the district. Turrentine said on the 2WAY show that Democrats should argue his push “is insufficient” and introduce legislation for more police officers in other cities.

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“As a party, what I would do is say, ‘Look, I’m going to introduce legislation for 100,000 new police officers paid for with tariff revenue. This is a problem in New Orleans, in Memphis, in St. Louis, red cities, blue cities. Americans don’t feel safe,” Turrentine said. “The last like six or seven years, for whatever reason, COVID, etc., crime has kind of come back to where it was in the 80s and stuff, where people who live in cities don’t feel very safe anymore. We should embrace that. We should be on the side of common sense.”

“And I think I would say, like ‘Great, I expect now, Trump, you ought to send it into New Orleans,’ which is having another crime wave. Like I would try to go on offense and outflank him because look, he’s pulling the FBI off on stuff like immigration enforcement,” he continued. “So, it’s a twofer to kind of hit him, make him be insufficient and try to get back on offense on crime and safety.”

Democratic lawmakers have responded to the president’s complaints about violent crime in D.C. by asserting that it decreased by 35% in 2024, citing local police data that exclude crimes such as felony and aggravated assault, thereby making D.C.’s crime problem seem better than it is since the start of COVID-19 in 2020.

Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) solely includes homicide, sex abuse crimes, assault with a dangerous weapon, and robbery in its overall “violent crime” data, which demonstrated a decline in 2024. Aggravated assault and felony assault without the use of weapons are also excluded, although Washington law describes them as violent offenses inflicting bodily injury, and despite the reality that aggravated assaults are rising, according to the FBI.

The FBI includes a wider array of assaults in its violent crime statistics for the district, based on what local police provide to the bureau. The FBI’s data show that the number of violent offenses in the district only decreased by 10% in 2024 and remained slightly elevated compared to 2018.

The FBI’s data also indicated that homicides have remained higher than pre-COVID-19 levels in the years after 2020, except in 2021, a year when the district submitted faulty data, according to Axios. There were also 12% more aggravated assaults with or without a weapon in 2024 than in 2023, along with 37% more than in 2022, according to the FBI.

The U.S. government in June ran a $27 billion budget surplus, fueled in part by record tariff revenue, which exceeded $100 billion for the first time in a fiscal year, Reuters reported. Trump indicated on July 25 that his main priority with the revenue was to pay off debt, but also said a small rebate for some Americans was possible.