What's Really Happening to D.C.?

How bad is D.C.’s crime really? And should Trump be bringing the city under federal control in an attempt to solve its crime and disorder problems?

“What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writes Reason‘s Robby Soave, who lives there. “One is semi-professional gang crime, mostly confined to sketchy neighborhoods, that usually targets other gang members. This is the kind of crime every large city has, and is counteracted by spending more money on homicide detectives and then aggressively prosecuting illegal firearms violators.”

“Then there’s mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people setting up tent cities,” he continues, noting that the most egregiously large and disorderly encampments were cleaned up. “Lastly, there are large groups of teenagers rampaging through otherwise fairly nice and affluent areas, assaulting people and stealing cars, and also getting into fights with each other. Seems to be driven by a mix of post-pandemic societal collapse, trends in youth behavior, and insufficient action by authorities. It’s here where a more robust police presence might do the most good.” It’s this third group that news reports are mostly fixating on, the group responsible for the Big Balls assault and that has caught Trump’s attention.

Many counter that crime has declined over time: “A timely analysis from the crime researcher Jeff Asher shows that murder crested in December 2023 and has been declining steadily since; the 2025 total through last month equals the equivalent figure in 2019,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman for The Atlantic. “Carjackings are also down; Asher reports that July saw the fewest monthly carjackings since May 2020.” But, though the decrease is laudable, this is in part because crime and disorder were rampant during the pandemic. It has taken years for it to come down to seminormal rates, and those “normal rates” aren’t even that good: “The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020.” But lots of crime data is unfortunately easy to manipulate, and novel approaches by new entrants—young people engaged in serious property crime and assaults in previously safe areas—are surely worth stamping out as they emerge.

What’s the president doing? “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” he said during a press conference yesterday, announcing he’d deployed the National Guard. (A citywide curfew of 11 p.m. was also implemented in July and is in effect through the end of the month.) President Trump also said that, for the next 30 days, he’d invoke a little-known provision to bring the Metro police under federal control, empowering them to act more aggressively; in his parlance, to do “whatever the hell they want.”

While Mayor Bowser calls Trump’s takeover of DC police “unsettling and unprecedented,” she says “the fact that we have more law enforcement and presence in neighborhoods…that may be positive.”

— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) August 11, 2025

Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is publicly critical of this plan, calling it “unsettling and unprecedented,” actually stands to gain here. She doesn’t need to make many decisions or deploy the resources available to her; she can still blow all kinds of hot air about how Trump is the enemy if she so chooses; and she gets crime cleaned up in her city.

Federal government already screwing up: Excuse the source, but Slow Boring‘s Matthew Yglesias points out that a ton of D.C.’s criminal justice system is already under the federal government’s control, and the feds are doing a rather poor job managing it. “That starts with the US attorney’s office, which, unlike a normal federal prosecutor’s office, also does the job of a district attorney and prosecutes local crimes. More significantly, the basic local trial court—the DC Superior Court—is technically a federal court whose members need to be confirmed by the Senate. Senate majority leaders, understandably, are normally not that fired up about local trial courts in DC, and they don’t like to spend floor time on these confirmations.” A high vacancy rate (roughly 20 percent) is the result, which means people in need of punishment don’t receive it so swiftly.

The federal government also handles pretrial supervision for people who’ve been arrested and are awaiting full court proceedings, adds Yglesias, but the agencies handling this can’t seem to figure out how to do their damn jobs: The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, in 2023, “had 2,120 offenders on ‘maximum supervision level’ but only 490 outfitted with GPS monitors,” for example, per Politico. And when a pretrial release of a man accused of shooting 26 rounds from an AR-15 at a car made the rounds on the news, the Pretrial Services Agency came under intense scrutiny, with prosecutors writing in a legal filing that “while GPS monitoring by the vendor may be in real time, PSA’s monitoring of defendants is not. PSA only works during normal business hours. Therefore, PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact.” (When would you guess that the majority of violations occur?)

Trump, of course, is not focused on the unsexy work detailed above, which could meaningfully impact which criminals get locked up and how quickly, who gets leniency and who gets surveilled and confined.

Still, implementing a curfew and sending federal law enforcement in isn’t…the worst idea of all time—if done temporarily to solve a specific problem for which local leaders have abdicated responsibility.

“Trump has a great ability to point out the obvious that’s been in denial,” writes Chris Arnade on X. “Dems should take the lesson of DC to get their cities under control—for their own citizens’ sake—but they probably won’t learn that and bury head in and deeper, like they did with immigration.”

Crime discussion in US is broken because everyone intentionally (or ignorantly) overlooks how hyper local it is. It varies, often by factors of 100 or more, neighborhood by neighborhood, often block by block.

The vast majority of crime is committed by a tiny minority in a few,… https://t.co/epKVFE2SOj

— Chris Arnade ???????????? (@Chris_arnade) August 11, 2025

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Scenes from New York: “Half of all immigration court arrests nationwide were in New York City in late May and early June, according to a new analysis of federal immigration court and ICE data by THE CITY and Joseph Gunther, a Brooklyn mathematician who first identified a method to track courthouse arrests,” reports The City. “ICE officers elsewhere have been detaining thousands of people at workplaces, Home Depot parking lots and even sending militarized cavalry units through big city parks. But enforcement in New York City has been focused inside of the very buildings where people show up at civil immigration hearings to petition for the right to legally remain in the United States. It’s an approach that the agency had taken pains to avoid before Trump’s second term because of the deterrent effect it has on noncitizens with immigration court hearings.… At the same time that courthouse arrests began ramping up, ICE also ratcheted up arrests at mandatory check-ins with the agency. Those arrests took place at offices like the one across the street from 26 Federal Plaza, where THE CITY witnessed 31 arrests over two days, as well as another office inside 26 Federal Plaza itself, where people line up each morning.”

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QUICK HITS

• Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, a conservative, died under suspicious circumstances this week at age 39. He was “shot in the head while speaking to supporters in the capital’s Modelia neighborhood on June 7,” per Bloomberg. It’s not totally clear what happened, but “authorities have detained six people, including a teenager who was apprehended at the scene and formally charged this month with attempted murder and illegal possession of a weapon. The investigation is ongoing and it remains unclear who ordered the murder.”
• “Australia will recognise a Palestinian state at next month’s United Nations General Assembly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday, a move that adds to international pressure on Israel after similar announcements from France, Britain and Canada,” per Reuters.
• Alan Dershowitz will get free pierogies for life from one South Florida businessman upset about Dershowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard drama.
• “Inflation rose in July as President Trump’s tariffs intensified price pressures across a wider range of consumer goods and services,” reports The New York Times. “The Consumer Price Index stayed steady at 2.7 percent compared to the same time last year. On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.2 percent from June. But an important gauge tracking consumer prices that strips out volatile food and energy prices accelerated more rapidly.”

The post What’s Really Happening to D.C.? appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2025/08/12/whats-really-happening-to-d-c/