Daly: Crime in D.C. is a Real Problem; Denials and Pageantry Won't Fix It

Unfortunately, most our politics these days is just performance art.

Last week, President Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington D.C., saying that the district’s “rising violence” “urgently endangers public servants, citizens, and tourists, disrupts safe and secure transportation and the proper functioning of the Federal Government, and forces the diversion of critical public resources toward emergency response and security measures.”

Trump’s answer was to take temporary control of D.C.’s police department, and deploy hundreds of National Guard troops and federal agents to occupy the streets in “support of law enforcement.”

As The Dispatch’s Michael Warren reported:

The result has been a remarkable show of force in just a few short days… Officers from various federal law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Drug Enforcement Agency, have been walking patrol alongside the Metropolitan Police.

Unsurprisingly, many Trump supporters have been cheering on the orders, calling them necessary and long overdue. Trump’s detractors, on the other hand, have largely condemned the president’s actions, describing them “dystopian,” and even going as far as to insist that D.C.’s crime-rate really hadn’t been all that bad… and thus nothing needed to be done.

The reality of the situation doesn’t exactly support either of those perspectives.

Truth be told, crime in D.C. has been a real problem for decades. Though official police-department reports have shown a modest decline in the crime-rate since the end of the pandemic, its trajectory over the last decade and a half, including for violent crime, has been upward. When it comes to big cities, D.C.’s homicide rate is persistently among the worst in the country.

So, those trivializing the crime problem don’t have much of a leg to stand on. Citizens of D.C. should be demanding more from their elected officials.

On the other side of the coin, it sure seems like a heck of an overreach, based on the trend represented in the graph below, to not only declare the situation an “emergency,” but invoke a provision of federal law to effectively nationalize the police department.

Some would argue that those “plummeting” numbers since 2010 shouldn’t detract from the broader point that the current numbers remain very high. I agree. Again, the crime problem is real. But if everything bad and in need of improvement is considered an “emergency” — one that grants additional power to the federal government — where does it end?

I’m not going to do a deep dive into separation-of-powers concerns today (even with some GOP leaders seemingly favoring martial law in major cities as a logical next step), because I believe everything Trump has done so far on this front is legal.

But I will ask a question that I think is fairly important: will this federal initiative actually curb D.C. crime in a meaningful way? Or is it all just political theater?

Just through deductive reasoning, one would assume that the mere presence of federal officers would indeed blunt crime (if only just in the short term). But even that is in question.

As Warren points out in his piece, the deployment has largely been in relatively low crime areas like the National Mall and Georgetown (the latter of which has had only one violent crime reported since January). This tactic would seem to make sense if the purpose were to maximum media-coverage of the operation. Far less so if the goal were to, as McGruff the Crime Dog used to famously say, “help take a bite out of crime.”

Speaking of publicity (and bites), you might have heard about the now-former DOJ employee who was arrested in D.C. a week ago for throwing a Subway sandwich at one of those deployed federal officers. The culprit was charged with felony assault.

And to assure the incident made national headlines, the feds, three days later, in the middle of the night, sent 20 officers (yes, 20) — dressed in riot-gear and accompanied by a camera crew — to the man’s home to rearrest him on a federal warrant.

The next morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly commented on the operation:

Who knew that this fellow, in addition to weaponizing his lunch, was part of The Deep State (whatever that means at this point)?

Anyway, to be clear, I have no sympathy for the sandwich-slinger. If you throw something — anything — at a law-enforcement officer, you should have something thrown back at you: the book. I’m glad he was charged and I have no problem with him being fired.

But the over-the-top, Naked Gun-worthy federal response to this guy only bolsters the argument that this supposed anti-crime initiative is far more about performative posturing than it is security or effective government.

I mean, not even seven months ago, our president issued full pardons to roughly 1,600 individuals for far more serious criminal actions committed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Hundreds of those people assaulted police officers, and not with sandwiches. They used fists, kicks to the head, bear spray, flag poles, stun-guns, guardrails, and more. Close to 150 officers were injured in the attack, some so badly that they had to retire from the force. 15 were hospitalized. One died from a series of strokes the next day. Four later committed suicide.

As my friend Dave Thul remarked online:

Note to DC residents- if you are going to throw something at law enforcement (which I don’t condone) at least make sure you wrap it in a MAGA flag so you will get a pardon.

While everyday crime in Washington D.C. is a separate matter from what went down on January 6, Trump’s egregious pardons of those who assaulted police officers that day render Bondi’s remarks comically meaningless.

If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you?

You will NOT work in this administration while disrespecting our government and law enforcement?

These are laugh-lines from this administration.

Fox News’s Jessica Tarlov pointed out this disconnect on The Five last week, prompting co-host Greg Gutfeld to outright deny that Capitol police officers were meaningfully assaulted that day.

No, I’m not joking.

“They didn't beat the crap out of police,” Gutfeld insisted, apparently concluding that the aforementioned 150 cops, including officers Michael Fanone and Aquilino Gonell (pictured below), merely faked their injuries. Oh, and also that the many assaults captured on video were also phony.

Gutfeld’s comment was far more perverse than the words of those insisting that D.C. doesn’t have a crime problem, but its defiance of reality falls directly in line with the performative BS that keeps legitimate problems from being addressed.

If you can’t begin a political debate with an accepted set of facts, the best outcome you can hope for is the discovery of a talking point… not a solution. For that reason, I sadly don’t see the crime situation in D.C. changing anytime soon.