Recent dismissals of Washington, D.C.’s severe violence by some liberal politicians and journalists as mere Republican demagoguery reveal a troubling reluctance to candidly address the crime affecting the city’s working-class and poor communities. This denial creates a political opening for figures like Donald Trump, who employs language that, however cynical, resonates with concerned voters.
In response to Trump’s federal takeover of policing in the capital, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia asserted that crime “is at a 30-year low in D.C., making these steps a waste of taxpayer dollars.” While this holds true for violent crime overall, the city’s murder rate was consistently lower throughout the 2010s. Similarly, The Guardian acknowledged that D.C.’s violent crime rate is above the national average but noted it is “not among the most violent large cities in the United States.” Meanwhile, Jim Kessler, a think-tank executive and former top aide to Senator Charles Schumer, advised on Fox News, “If people are afraid to come to D.C., go to Disney World, get fat, eat French fries.”
Criticism of Trump’s policing strategy is warranted. Reassigning FBI agents, who lack familiarity with the District’s neighborhoods, to serve as street-level police is a questionable tactic. The use of National Guard soldiers, who have minimal law enforcement training, is equally problematic. Furthermore, some of the nation’s most violent cities, including Memphis, Cleveland, and Little Rock, are located in pro-Trump states.
However, these points do not negate the reality of crime in D.C. or the political imprudence of dismissing it. Opponents of the federal intervention have highlighted that homicides in the District fell from 287 in 2023 to 187 in 2024. Yet, this improved figure still represents a per capita rate that would be equivalent to 2,244 homicides in New York City. By comparison, New York, with over 12 times the population, recorded 377 homicides last year.
The issue of violence in Washington is deeply segregated by race and class. A recent Washington Post map of 2024 homicides shows that predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park and gentrified areas like Capitol Hill and the Navy Yard have homicide rates comparable to those in Copenhagen.
The situation is far grimmer across the Anacostia River in the majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, where over 40 percent of children live in poverty. These two wards accounted for more than half of the District’s homicides last year. A 2020 report on gun violence by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform found that Black males, who comprise 46 percent of D.C.’s population, represented well over 90 percent of both victims and suspects.
Reporting from the city in the late 1990s, when D.C. was known as the nation’s murder capital, involved speaking with young men who had witnessed friends being killed and who possessed heavy weapons and body armor for protection. Mothers described training their children to roll off their beds and onto the floor at the sound of gunfire. In one particularly stark conversation, a grieving father suggested it was for the best that his son, a drug dealer, had died. “If he’d made it,” he explained, “the first thing that would have come to his mind was revenge.”
The root causes of this violence remain complex and unresolved. The D.C. police department is better staffed per capita than those in New York City or Chicago, even without counting the various federal police forces. Something is profoundly wrong in many of the city’s neighborhoods, and this reality should not be ignored simply because it serves a political narrative. While Trump’s motives for targeting a Democratic-controlled city may be cynical, a mother in Ward 8 might still find comfort in a National Guard soldier standing watch near her child’s school. It would be audacious to insist to her that the daily threat she faces is merely an illusion.
