Megan McArdle

Trump is right to worry about the homicide rate in the District. So should the city’s progressives.

August 12, 2025 at 8:45 a.m. EDTToday at 8:45 a.m. EDT

5 min

I make a point of agreeing with President Donald Trump whenever he is right about something, and I’m afraid he is right that in D.C., crime and disorder is a major problem. It is not as big a problem as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, “somewhat less of a problem than it was” is not really very good news.

This does not justify Trump’s harebrained scheme to deploy the National Guard to patrol the streets, an idea that marries sinister overtones with very limited effectiveness. Nor is the problem likely to be solved by federalizing D.C. law enforcement and prosecutions, as he suggested at a Monday news conference. But Trump’s critics will not talk him out of these plans by conjuring the specter of a fascist takeover, nor by arguing that he shouldn’t be worried about crime, because after all, look how much it’s fallen!

D.C. had 187 homicides in 2024, or about 27 for every 100,000 residents. That is, to be sure, a massive 32 percent drop from the 273 people who were killed in 2023, but that probably wasn’t much comfort to those 187 people or their grieving families. And it’s horrific compared with Boston, which had 3.7 homicides per 100,000 residents during that same time frame, New York City (4.7) or Los Angeles (7.1). Even a further reduction in 2025 — year-to-date homicides have fallen 12 percent compared with the same period last year — won’t bring those numbers anywhere near where they should be. This is the capital city of our country. We ought to be able to do at least as well as other major cities.

Motor vehicle thefts tell a similar story. (I focus on these two crimes because they are somewhat less vulnerable to changes in reporting or statistical methods — bodies are hard to hide, and car thefts are the best reported property crime.) In 2024, New York had almost three times as many cars stolen as D.C. — in a city that has over 10 times our population. Even adjusting for higher rates of car ownership, that’s a huge difference.

And those are just the felonies; disorder, such as public drug use or homelessness, is also a serious issue. It does not endanger life or property, but it does make public spaces less usable, fraying the civic fabric that knits a city together. As Trump said in his news conference, “Washington D.C. should be one of the safest, cleanest and most beautiful cities in the world.” At the moment it is not.

So how to solve those problems, if not with the National Guard and tougher federal prosecutions? For starters, D.C.’s progressive establishment needs to show a serious commitment to solving the problem, which means beefing up the criminal justice system, not just hunting for “root causes” that can be addressed by social workers.

That doesn’t mean endorsing the harsh rhetoric of Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for D.C., who has suggested she’d like to prosecute more teenagers as adults. Rather, it means hiring enough police, and keeping the police active enough, to ensure that crime doesn’t pay.

As Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani argued in a 2022 paper, America is underpoliced but overincarcerated. Because we don’t have enough police to control crime, violent crime is high compared to the rest of the developed world, and clearance rates are low. We have tried to compensate for this by handing down more severe sentences for those who are caught. Unfortunately, the sort of people who are good at calculating the expected value of their actions tend not to become criminals, so this doesn’t work very well — especially in the case of juveniles, who have been involved in some horrific, high-profile crimes in recent years.

Pirro’s approach is approximately backward: We don’t need harsher sentences, but more capacity to ensure that some sentence, any sentence, will result from a crime. Staffing fell at the D.C. police department post-pandemic, and so did stops and arrests. Though the situation has stabilized, and crime is now falling from its pandemic highs, the level of violence remains unacceptable. Progressives and conservatives should unite to drive it even lower — a project of years, not a summer political stunt. We will also need more capacity in the courts and prosecutors’ offices, a problem not helped by the administration’s purges at the Justice Department.

If we can make prosecution more likely, we can also afford to make it less harsh in many cases: A near-certainty of a long spell of home confinement with an ankle monitor and video surveillance is probably a better deterrent for a 14-year-old than a slight chance of a spell in juvenile detention. And he won’t pick up new criminal associates — or tips on carjacking — in his bedroom.

Those who are opposed to Trump’s recent moves should argue not that they constitute incipient fascism, but that they aren’t a real solution. The department needs more money to hire more officers; better training, management and advancement opportunities for those officers; and the assurance that the people they catch will be prosecuted. And the D.C. Department of Corrections needs to pioneer new approaches that Republicans and Democrats can live with: sanctions focused on deterrence and incapacitation, not retribution or political showmanship.

By Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and the author of "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success."follow on X@asymmetricinfo

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5761577&forum_id=2E#49178099)

The author is suggesting we hire a lot more cops to ensure that Trayvon McNiggy stays at home with an ankle monitor. This is bullshit. Just send him to the can. Crimes have consequences. The average black murder suspect who comes before the judge has a rap sheet the size of a phone book.

It's extremely simple if you have a competent DA. Convict and sentence. No probation no second chances. If people start having to do the time they will shape up. It's a few bad eggs that ruin it for everybody. Identify the bad actors and remove them from the population. Easy fix but Jews understand Soros DA can ruin an entire city and get people to vote lib.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5761577&forum_id=2E#49178124)