Send in the troops! That’s President Donald Trump’s plan to reduce violent crime in the nation’s capital. The president made the announcement yesterday that he would be implementing a 30-day takeover of Washington, D.C.’s police department, and supplementing their efforts with 800 National Guard troops.
In response, Democrats, liberal pundits and the mainstream media reacted with fury that someone would try to actually address D.C.’s crime problems. Their responses ranged from anger over the federal takeover to denial that there’s even a problem at all, to desperate attempts to talk about something else. Seriously, the national reporters at the press conference swiftly pivoted to questions about Russia-Ukraine, which is the only subject that holds the mainstream media’s interest for more than a few seconds.
My favorite response was from CNN’s Dana Bash, who took the opportunity to remind her viewers about — you guessed it — January 6th.
“As we go to break, I should note that the most violent moment in recent history in DC was January 6th, and it was an attack on the United States Capitol by a lot of people who were doing it in the name of Donald Trump.”
Look, January 6th was, in fact, bad. It’s bad when protesters fight with cops and smash windows— something leftwing protesters did in D.C. throughout the summer of 2023. But “most violent moment in recent history”? What does that even mean?
Here are the actual facts: Violence in Washington, D.C. spiked massively as a result of the pandemic, reversing a trend of greatly declining violence since the mid-1990s. D.C. saw an unprecedented wave of carjackings, and more murders in 2023 than any previous year on record since 1997.
Now, it’s also true that violence has declined since then, and that’s great. It should be recognized and celebrated — with the caveat that a D.C. police commander was suspended for falsifying crime data a few months back.
What’s really going on, in my opinion, is that three basic realities about crime and disorder in D.C. are being conflated.
First, D.C. has plenty of gang-related violence — that is, not random. The victims of these killings, which are usually shootings, are typically other gang members. Disproportionately, this violence takes place in poorer and historically unsafe neighborhoods. This is the same kind of crime that many large cities struggle with, from Chicago to Detroit to Philadelphia to Baltimore, and so on.
The way to address it is to investigate and solve more murder cases by giving homicide detectives more resources, and then prosecuting unlawful firearm possessions. We have to take away guns, not from law-abiding citizens but from individuals who are already disqualified from having weapons due to prior convictions. Any city that does that will substantially reduce its crime problem.
The second issue is mentally ill drug addicts occupying public spaces and setting up tent cities. This peaked during the pandemic, when vagrants turned Union Station, one of D.C.’s most beautiful spaces, into a shanty town for addicts. Note that this isn’t actually the city government’s fault; federal property, like the green space in front of the train station, is actually managed by the feds, who weren’t doing a very good job during the pandemic. Thankfully, the tent cities are now mostly gone.
The third issue is by some measures the most concerning. There are informal gangs of teenagers entering more affluent, theoretically safer areas of the city, engaging in violence and vandalism: mugging, carjacking etc. This category of crime is what has prompted Trump’s decision to take over the police response: a 19-year-old former employee of DOGE was attacked over the weekend by a group of unruly teens.
As a citizen of Washington, D.C., this is the sort of thing I’m most worried about. I’ve seen it in my own neighborhood this summer, which prompted the area of D.C. I live in to start enforcing curfews for teenagers. Anecdotally, a more robust police presence has deterred this kind of crime, at least somewhat, where I live.
As Trump grapples with these waves of carjacking teenagers, I’d say that the main thing is for the police to just be more available. I don’t want to turn D.C. into some kind of authoritarian surveillance state, where every kid is stopped when he gets off the metro. But more law enforcement officers on our streets, monitoring the situation, will mean a reduction in crimes of opportunity.
And as for all the CNN liberals screaming about Trump’s decision — they may be complaining about it on your televisions, but they certainly aren’t complaining about it in private. On the contrary, it’s readily apparent to most people who live in D.C., Democrats and Republicans, that something is very wrong in the nation’s capital.
Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.
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