While I listened this week to liberal politicians and journalists this week closing a speech on Washington, the heartbreaking violence of DC as a simple republican demagogy, I was struck by many discouraging progressives to speak with frankness of the plague of crime affecting the working class and the poor Americans. This denial opens a door to President Donald Trump to speak in a language, so cynical, which resonates with these voters.
Responding to Trump’s police in the national capital, Senator Tim Kaine, a Liberal Democrat in Virginia, said this week that crime “is a hollow of 30 years at DC, making these measures a waste of dollars of taxpayers”. Although this is true for violent crimes in general, the city’s murder rate was lower throughout the 2010s. The guardian Recognized that “violent crimes are higher in Washington DC than the national average”, but reassured readers that the capital is “not among the big most violent cities in the United States today”. Jim Kessler, a leader of the reflection group who previously worked as legislative and political director of the leader of the Senate minority, Charles Schumer, consulted Fox News to advise the Americans to suffocate their fears. “If people are afraid of coming to DC,” he said, “go to Disney World, get fat, eat fries.”
I hate to defend Trump’s police in DC realloring FBI agents, because beaten cops are a dubious practice of fighting crime, because agents have little known the districts of the district and how to distinguish good people and those who are pure problems. The soldiers of the National Guard, to declare the evidence, have little training in police work.
And some of the most violent cities in the country – such as Memphis, Cleveland and Little Rock, Arkansas – are found in pro -Trump states.
This does not mean that the city is sure, or that it is politically wise to reject concerns about crime. Trump’s opponents this week did a large part of the fact that homicides in the district went from 287 in 2023 to 187 in 2024. improved The number in the district is equivalent in terms per capita at 2,244 homicides in New York. The actual count of last year was 377 – slightly more than twice as many homicides than in DC, but New York has more than 12 times more people.
When I worked for The Washington Post At the end of the 1990s, not long after the period when DC was the capital of the country’s murder – I reported the city’s tragically high homicide rates. At the time and now, this problem, like so many other aspects of life in Washington, was de facto separated by the race and the class. THE Job Recently published a map of homicides of 2024, with tiny circles for the name and location of all those who were killed. It becomes clear: to wander in the white predominantly districts of the middle class superior to the west of Rock Creek Park and the completely gentrified areas of Capitol Hill and Navy Yard is to go through the districts with homicide rates closer to Copenhagen.
But through the Anacostia river in mainly black districts 7 and 8, where more than 40% of children live in poverty, reality is much darker. Last year, more than half of the district homicides took place in these neighborhoods. Four years ago, the National Institute for Criminal Justice reform published a report on armed violence in DC Bien, more than 90% of victims and suspects were black men, the report concluded that “despite black residents representing only 46% of the global population of the district”.
When I arrived in Washington in 1996, the Job At the beginning of each week would print a memoir which reduced the assessment of the previous weekend with a terrible agate of names and addresses of the victims. What I remember most at the time was to speak with young men who had seen friends killed, and some of whom had terrifying weapons and throat vests. The mothers described to me how they formed their children to roll from their bed and hit the floor at the sound of the gunshots. A mourning father told me that it was perhaps as well as his son, a drug dealer, was dead. “If he had done,” he said, “the first thing that would have come to mind was revenge.”
The intensity of this bleeding was not easily explained at the time – and this remains the case today. DC police forces have even more officers per capita than New York or Chicago, and that does not include federal police forces that patrol Capitol Hill and parks. Something remains terribly bad in too many districts of the district, and no one should reject it simply because Trump seems to use cynical of this misery.
I have no doubt that Trump likes to target cities controlled by democrats for embarrassment. Nor did I doubt that a mother in district 8 can comfort a soldier of the National Guard standing on surveillance near the school of her child. And I try to imagine having the audacity to insist that homicides and the danger which are his daily reality are in a way a fantasy.
