\n<\/p>\n
Three weeks into Donald Trump\u2019s deployment of federal forces into Washington, D.C., the president announced on Truth Social that the capital had become a \u201cCRIME FREE ZONE.\u201d To hear the president tell it, the District\u2014now patrolled by more than 2,200 members of the National Guard and federal law-enforcement officers from roughly 10 government agencies\u2014has gone from hellscape to paradise. \u201cPeople who haven\u2019t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner,\u201d Trump said days into the surge. Along similar lines, his close adviser Stephen Miller declared that D.C. residents \u201care wearing their watches again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crime in D.C. does seem to be down. Publicly available numbers provided by the District\u2019s Metropolitan Police Department indicate a decline in crime year over year in the weeks since the increased law-enforcement presence began, on August 11. A few factors make these data hard to interpret, however: D.C.\u2019s crime was already in decline, obscuring the effect of Trump\u2019s federal surge on its own. Moreover, these numbers may yet change\u2014\u201cIt\u2019s far too soon to be able to say anything with any confidence,\u201d Jeff Asher, an expert in crime data, told me.<\/p>\n
The bigger question, though, is whether any accelerated dip in crime rates can be sustained. On that account, Trump\u2019s crackdown may prove not just ineffective but also counterproductive, upending the regular rhythms of life in the District and poisoning the relationship between the city and its police. The president\u2019s emergency power to direct MPD expired on September 10, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser indicated that local police have also wound down their cooperation with ICE\u2014though Trump recently threatened to declare yet another emergency to start that cooperation up again. It\u2019s not clear, meanwhile, how much longer the National Guard and federal law enforcement will roam the city. Whenever Trump\u2019s deployment comes to an end, it could end up helping engineer the urban disorder he claims to combat.<\/p>\n
Violent crime in D.C. has followed a similar pattern as in other American cities, peaking in the 1990s and then falling sharply. It rose again during the pandemic years, though to nowhere near the heights of the \u201990s. That post-pandemic spike persisted longer in D.C. than it did in many other major U.S. cities, but crime caught up to the national trend and began a rapid decline in 2024. In the first days of 2025, federal prosecutors announced that violent crime in the District had fallen to the lowest rate in 30 years. The city still had problems, particularly in poor neighborhoods, but things were moving in the right direction overall. (Initially, Trump insisted that these crime numbers had been faked to obscure an imagined crime problem. Since his takeover, however, he has been happy to rely on crime statistics from that same source to argue that his deployment has been effective.)<\/p>\n
Crime data are notoriously difficult to interpret. But Asher has argued that the recent fall in crime across the nation may stem in part from the renewed flow of federal investment in cities following the pandemic\u2014improving economic stability generally and funding policies aimed specifically at cutting down on violence. When we spoke, Asher also pointed to the gradual relaxation of tensions between police and communities that flared up in response to the George Floyd protests of 2020. The problem now is that the federal crackdown may itself be undermining these favorable dynamics.<\/p>\n
In particular, the surge seems to be having a deleterious economic effect on D.C. Reservations and foot traffic to many restaurants are sharply down, and others have closed unexpectedly as immigrant workers have stayed home for fear of being swept up by ICE. Taxi trips and bikeshare rides are down as well. Tourism also appears to be declining, with a dip in hotel bookings. As with the crime data, whether the federal presence will leave a lasting economic mark is too soon to say, but the dip in spending is not a welcome development for a city already struggling with the economic aftershocks of DOGE\u2019s mass layoffs of federal workers, who make up a significant portion of the District\u2019s workforce.<\/p>\n
In addition to dealing with a potential economic slowdown, D.C. is also newly short on funds to finance programs addressing the root causes of crime, after the Justice Department slashed grant funding for programs led by D.C. organizers to help de-escalate violence and resolve community problems. As Toluse Olorunnipa writes in The Atlantic<\/em>, such programs have been shown to be successful in actually reducing crime. But Trump appears less interested in community-focused violence intervention than in knocking heads. He cares only about certain kinds of crime prevention.<\/p>\n Likewise, he appears to care only about certain kinds of crime. The federal government has also cut funding for D.C. organizations working to address domestic violence, Natalia Otero, who leads the nonprofit D.C. Safe, told me. She now worries that the increased presence of federal officers will prevent people from getting help, because victims of domestic violence might worry about hostility from police or getting swept up by immigration enforcement. Her concerns seem well founded: Anusc\u00e8 Sanai, the associate legal director for the immigrant-aid nonprofit Ayuda, told me that her organization has changed its advice for immigrant victims of domestic abuse who may be vulnerable to deportation. Although previously Ayuda had recommended that victims always call the police, Sanai said, \u201cWe are no longer saying, \u2018Call 911 automatically.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The abrupt changes to city life after August 11 could bring about other kinds of dysfunction. D.C. has long struggled with high rates of student absenteeism, which spiked after the pandemic\u2014coinciding with a disturbing rise in juvenile crimes, especially carjackings. Both of those trends are now on the decline, and D.C. has focused resources on getting children and teenagers back in the classroom. Will the increased federal presence dissuade students from skipping class, or scare them off from heading to school? What about the children of immigrants, who might be at particular risk of missing school if their family fears arrest by ICE? So far, the city says that attendance appears stable. But \u201ceveryone is on the lookout\u201d for how the federal presence might affect student absences, Hannah Mason, an education researcher at the D.C. Policy Center, told me\u2014although she emphasized that absenteeism is complex and isn\u2019t caused by any single factor.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most worrying long-term effect of the changes will be the community\u2019s loss of trust in the various law-enforcement agencies on the ground. In the largely Latino neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, signs have appeared cautioning residents not to speak to MPD, and to treat local police \u201cas if they were ICE agents.\u201d Those signs are a warning not only for the community but for police too: If people don\u2019t trust local cops, they won\u2019t call when something goes wrong. \u201cPeople feel, maybe rightly so, that the institutions that were in other circumstances seen as protective are now predatory,\u201d Otero explained to me. Even if MPD\u2019s collaboration with ICE ends for good, as Bowser indicated, that suspicion of local police will be difficult to scrub away.<\/p>\n At least some officers within MPD seem to be aware of this problem. \u201cWhat relationships do we have to repair once this surge is over?\u201d asked MPD Sixth District Police Commander Jaron Hickman at a community meeting in late August, wondering aloud, \u201cWe are getting some violent people off the streets\u2014but in the long run, at what cost?\u201d<\/p>\n Late one night in early September, I was in Mount Pleasant when a Park Police helicopter buzzed alarmingly low overhead, rattling windows and terrifying a friend\u2019s children. As police cars swarmed outside a beloved local restaurant, people lined the streets to film what everyone seemed certain was an immigration raid. The MPD officer standing near me seemed uncomfortable in the face of angry stares. Later, I learned from MPD and federal court records that the police had arrived in response to a call about a man with a gun, who had been arrested down the road. At another time, people might have been reassured to see a police dispatch that successfully removed a stolen gun from the street. The neighborhood, however, had been primed to think of law enforcement as an occupying force.<\/p>\n Residents present were suspicious in part because federal officers had arrived alongside MPD and the fire department, though nobody seemed to know which agencies were there. That hostility toward federal law enforcement is itself dangerous: Once immigrant communities start seeing FBI agents conducting arrests alongside ICE, they\u2019re less likely to cooperate with the bureau\u2019s work countering transnational-gang activities and drug trafficking. Then there are all the investigations that aren\u2019t being conducted because of the surge. The FBI\u2019s Washington field office is populated with agents who normally focus on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, along with complex criminal probes. Now their regular work is on hold so that agents can make traffic stops.<\/p>\n That sort of street policing requires its own skills, which federal officers don\u2019t necessarily have. FBI agents, for example, are probably not familiar with the intricacies carrying out a search that will hold up in court\u2014a lack of knowledge that could risk endangering prosecutions if an agent\u2019s actions turn out to have violated the law. At least one gun case resulting from the federal presence has already been thrown out because of similar concerns, though the search in question was conducted by MPD.<\/p>\n A botched court case is far from the worst possible outcome of sending agents to police streets without training in how to work as beat cops. These are people with guns, walking the city with little background in de-escalating violence or using less-than-lethal force. The same is true for the National Guard troops standing armed with pistols and long guns at Metro stops. So far, no shots have been fired\u2014but D.C. residents have faced other dangers from the federal troops ostensibly deployed to protect them. The Park Police have restarted a dangerous practice of conducting car chases, which has already led to multiple crashes. On Capitol Hill, an armored National Guard vehicle ran a red light and smashed into an SUV. Firefighters arrived to extract the SUV\u2019s driver, who luckily escaped with only minor injuries.<\/p>\n If one takes Trump<\/span> at his word that he wants to reduce crime and increase public safety in D.C., the federal deployment is largely incoherent. His approach makes more sense if crime<\/em> is taken to refer not to actual criminal behavior but rather to any behavior Trump finds objectionable, including everything from minor disorder to opposition to his administration. And crime that reinforces traditional hierarchies\u2014like domestic violence\u2014is not of concern. At a speech last week at the Museum of the Bible in which Trump falsely crowed over how D.C. had \u201cno crime,\u201d he also appeared to suggest that reports of men having \u201ca little fight with the wife\u201d should not be tallied as criminal.<\/p>\n Despite what Trump says, in 2025, America\u2019s major cities are not \u201chellholes.\u201d Although they have real problems, they are, on the whole, safe and prosperous. But this refusal to concede to reality as Trump would like to see it is, in the president\u2019s mind, an act of insolence. As the urbanist Ned Resnikoff writes, D.C. and other diverse cities are targets for Trump precisely because <\/em>they model a vision of America that is opposed to MAGA\u2019s obsession with rigid social structures and racial homogeneity. The goal of the federal surge seems to be not to make the capital safe but to let its residents know that they should be afraid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three weeks into Donald Trump\u2019s deployment of federal forces into Washington, D.C., the president announced on Truth Social that the capital had become a \u201cCRIME FREE ZONE.\u201d To hear the president tell it, the District\u2014now patrolled by more than 2,200 members of the National Guard and federal law-enforcement officers from roughly 10 government agencies\u2014has gone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[8854,9166],"class_list":{"0":"post-21516","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-d-c","9":"tag-safer"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}