The bigger picture shows D.C. crime is on the rise, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily, days after President Donald Trump announced he is placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and activating the National Guard to restore law and order in the nation’s capital.
Sund explained that there are several agencies working together to secure D.C. and highlighted that Trump is a “very, very detail-oriented person.”
“In case people don’t know that, it is not uncommon for him to be driving in a motorcade and realize, hey, street lights are out, or look at that or look at that graffiti and make a notification on it. That is how detail-oriented this President is. So for him to see some of the crime that’s happening and some of the assaults that are occurring — and Navy Yard is just six blocks south of the of the Capitol, short distance from the White House. It’s a big area,” he said.
“To see these gangs of youth kind of taking it over, it doesn’t surprise me that they’re now going to pull these federal resources together and form… [a] task force,” he said, explaining that they have done this before.
“We did this in the early ’90s, when I was with D.C. police, we were able to drive down homicide rates. When Chief Lanier was chief, think about 2010 to 2014, we had a homicide rate that was maybe right around 100, 170 a year. Now 2023, you got 274 homicides. So you had a significant increase,” he said, addressing the individuals who claim D.C. crime is going down — a narrative pushed by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D).
“So when people talk about, ‘Oh, there’s big drop,’ there’s a drop from 2023 to 2024, but it’s still significant — double what we had in around 2010,” the former police chief pointed out, explaining that there “used to be a time the crime really stayed in certain neighborhoods.”
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However, he said it has now migrated throughout the city.
“So they’re going to deploy into these areas and really focus — focus on crime, focus on your most violent offenders, your repeat offenders,” he continued, urging officials to zero in on juvenile crime.
“They’ve always, historically, been very soft on punishment on juvenile crime. And the concern with that is, if you don’t begin to address behavior at a young age, it’s just going to get worse,” he noted, emphasizing that the D.C. homicide rate is “five to six times that of any other major city in the United States.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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