‘But crime is going down!” That’s what many liberal thought leaders are bleating lately, and who can blame them? President Trump has called Washington, DC, a “crime-ridden hellhole,” teeming with “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth,” and he’s quipped that “even the rats” are fleeing the nation’s capital. So it’s only fair to counter with data showing that violent crime in DC has been plunging swiftly from its pandemic peaks, and is currently at a 30-year low.
Then again, this statistic—“DC crime hit a 30-year low in 2024”—sure has been doing a lot of work lately, hasn’t it?
On Aug. 11, Trump announced he was temporarily seizing control of Washington’s police department. By the end of the day, the data showing that crime in DC had ebbed to its lowest level in three decades was cited or discussed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, NPR, Axios, the BBC, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many more publications.
None of them, however, mentioned equally relevant data showing that the nation’s capital still has one of the very worst homicide problems of any American city. And it was left to the gadfly Washington Free Beacon to point out that the “30-year low” claim may be exaggerated: “The Metropolitan Police Department recently suspended a commander for allegedly manipulating their data, a fact the mainstream media reports excluded,” the Free Beacon reported.
“Most people perceive crime at a gut level.”
Does it even matter at this point? People turn to statistics, goes the old saw, for the same reason a drunk might lean against a lamppost: more for support than illumination.
I do not support Trump’s bullyish takeover of the DC police department. But I understand why he thinks it’s a winning issue. For about the past sixty years, liberal intellectuals have struggled to talk honestly about the pernicious costs of predatory crime—the ways it frightens people, weakens attachments, erodes trust, inhibits mobility, and undermines communities. You don’t need Trump’s lizard-brain instincts to see that most people perceive crime at a gut level, and that since urban crime emerged as a national issue in the 1960s, it’s been a losing issue for Democrats. You just need a brain.
Among historians, crime in the United States has long been discussed within a broader narrative of backlash. Scholars agree that in response to the turbulence of the 1960s, and to curry favor with resentful whites, professional political polarizers such as George Wallace and Richard Nixon stigmatized African Americans as deviants and criminals.
But the failures of liberals to adequately address urban crime—or to appreciate its significance—are much less appreciated. Some went so far as to deny that crime was even rising. Others relativized the crime by pointing out that muggings and thefts—however unpleasant—were trivial offenses compared to the greater injustice of systemic racism. Liberals frequently used crime increases as a rationale to advocate for programs they already favored. Increased funding for education, daycare centers, low-income housing, healthcare, and poverty reduction were all said to be necessary parts of a comprehensive crime reduction agenda. These pieties about root causes have never been helpful. Most people are not interested in long-term solutions to immediate problems caused by muggers, thieves, addicts, and the bedlamite homeless.
Since the 1960s, the United States has been one of the most dynamic, fast-changing societies in history. The country has reinvented itself many times over demographically, culturally, and technologically. But Democrats’ political vulnerabilities around urban crime have stubbornly persisted.
The reason is unpleasant to discuss. It has to do with our discomfort about the racial dimensions of the crime problem. In Washington, for instance, African Americans make up less than 45 percent of the city’s residents but commit well over 90 percent of the city’s crimes involving guns. Certain terrifying crimes, such as carjackings—like the one Trump cited when he announced his DC takeover—are almost only committed by African Americans.
Educated liberals are well-aware of the grotesque ways blacks have been treated during long stretches of this nation’s history—slavery, Jim Crow, and racial terrorism. In light of this, some find it unseemly to discuss violent crime as a social problem that African Americans disproportionately contribute to. I get it. The problem, however, is that the Democrats’ reticence has been counterproductive. Republicans know this, which is why Trump and his supporters talk about crime in ways that skip the frontal lobe and light up the spine. Liberals, however, could perhaps outmaneuver Trump if they’d just be forthright about how violent crime impacts its victims.
Take just one of approximately 1,000 carjackings that occurred in metro DC in 2022. (Anna Rose Layden reported on it in The Atlantic.) One early morning, Shantise Summers had just returned to her home in Oxon Hill, Maryland, after a night out with friends, when she was rushed from behind by four teenagers wearing ski masks. One of the assailants put a gun to her face. They seized her belongings (phone, wallet, keys, and Apple watch) and sped away with her 2019 Honda Accord.
Summers was so rattled and unmoored that she couldn’t work for days. She became an insomniac and feared to even leave her apartment. Finally, she needed groceries, so she summoned the courage to venture into a Safeway, where she had a breakdown, “standing in the middle of the store crying and shaking.” Since she had contacted the police to report the carjacking, she was terrified that the criminals, who may have belonged to a gang, would launch a reprisal.
Fortunately, police apprehended the teens. Prosecutors, however, declined to file charges against one of the perps. While trying to flee the cops, he’d severely injured himself in a car wreck—first hitting a city bus, then careening into a telephone pole. The other two teens took plea deals. The fourth, only 16 when he committed the felony, was merely ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution to Summers (which no one expected she would receive). “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves,” Summers observed. “What will they become next? Because the system just told them that armed carjacking is okay.”
Let’s assume most of the other 999 of DC’s carjacking victims felt similar to Summers: terrified to the bones, disoriented, unable to sleep or function normally for days, indignant, confused, and perhaps even vengeful.
Now consider how these effects radiate outward. Due to the carjacking, Summers moved out of the apartment she’d been living in for eight years. Do you think their neighbors don’t know why? She is a mother of four. How did her kids feel knowing that masked teens put a gun to her head? Summers works at the US Post Office. Do you think her colleagues don’t know why she had to take a leave of absence?
“The nation’s crime problem calls for moral seriousness and political maturity.”
The nation’s crime problem calls for moral seriousness and political maturity. We need to acknowledge, first, that violent crime disproportionally comes from and affects lower-income black communities, and we should call for improvement of those communities. I realize this is a taboo opinion in many circles, and that itself is a problem. It should not be too much to hope that in 2025, more poverty-stricken African Americans take advantage of the opportunities our society affords them.
Democrats should stop minimizing crime’s significance. We need to understand what crime does to victims like Shantise Summers. Finally, stop gaslighting Americans about the pervasiveness of crime. There is simply no gainsaying that in recent years, particularly in Democrat-led cities, violent crime and disorder have become a national disgrace. It is part of what helped erode Americans’ trust in political leadership, thereby offering Trump a potent opening for his gambit.
A raging alcoholic who reduces his consumption to “a 30-year low”—but still gets drunk every day—has a problem. To extend the metaphor, as people in recovery recognize, you cannot solve a problem you’re unwilling to name.