In 2024, candidate Donald Trump pledged to "take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, D.C., and clean it up, renovate it, and rebuild our capital city so that it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime."
On Aug. 11, President Donald Trump announced he would federalize the district's Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard in D.C.
In response, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shared that she has a different goal: to "protect our autonomy." Bowser says she is ready to work with Trump to fight crime, even as she maintains that crime in the nation's capital is at a "30-year low." Caution: The district's reported violent crime rate for 2024 was more than double that of Las Vegas -- 1,005 per 100,000 residents versus 430, according to the FBI. New York is at 671 violent crimes per 100,000.
Ever tilting toward irrelevance, CNN says the big story is Trump's failure to recognize a reported 26% decrease in violent crime.
The NBC News headline reads: "Trump's unprecedented takeover of D.C. police comes as crime is down, figures show."
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller argued on X, "Crime stats in big blue cities are fake. The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher."
Last month, News4 broke the story about the district's Metropolitan Police Department suspending a police commander for changing crime statistics to minimize serious crimes. Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton told News4, "So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification."
Zack Smith of the conservative Heritage Foundation questioned the findings. After a 30-year-low crime statistic was issued by the Biden Department of Justice in January, Smith noted, "I think there are reasons to question the validity."
Especially in blue cities, victims may be less likely to report crimes because they do not believe authorities will respond and prosecute accordingly. Police may be less inclined to make arrests for what city politicians see as low-level crimes.
The left's take is that D.C. crime got out of hand post-COVID and peaked in 2023. So when CNN's chyron says, "Trump says without evidence that DC crime stats are 'rigged,'" consider the source. And remember COVID, Russiagate and Joe Biden's fitness for office. Big media lean on dubious statistics and ignore the pile-up of horror stories. In November 2023, an FBI agent was carjacked in an agency car. Earlier that year, Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., was assaulted in her apartment building near Union Station, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, was carjacked at gunpoint and a staffer for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was stabbed in D.C.
Critics argue that Trump's interest was piqued after former DOGE staffer Edward "Big Balls" Coristine, 19, was assaulted and bloodied at the hands of juvenile carjacking suspects earlier this month. But before that, 3-year-old Honesty Cheadle was shot and killed in a car in early July.
At the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, Trump offered that Democrats should join Republicans to pass a D.C. crime bill, but they don't know how to work with him, he lamented, even on what he sees as the winning issue of fighting crime.
Instead, Beltway Democrats are tone-deaf. Bowser used the moment to preach for "full statehood for the District of Columbia" -- a raw power play that would create two more reliably Democratic U.S. Senate seats based on sketchy bureaucracy statistics.
On the one hand, it's refreshing that Trump sees high crime in the nation's capital as an emergency -- and unacceptable. On the other hand, with raw politics on both sides, this gambit could backfire.
Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.
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