While Democrats are worrying about “land acknowledgments” at their policy convention in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump has taken on violent crime in Washington, D.C., deploying National Guard units to supplement the city’s hard-pressed police force.
He’s putting points on the scoreboard. Violent crime in the District is down 26 percent from last year. Comparing the same three-week period since Trump used his power as president to bring the National Guard into D.C., crime is down by half, including homicides (57 percent), burglary (48 percent), and assault (19 percent), according to CBS News.
“Donald Trump has the constitutional authority to do this, since D.C. is not a state,” says Peter Schweizer on this week’s episode of The Drill Down. “The deeper issue, though, is why has crime been tolerated to the extent that it has in these cities?” Seeing Trump’s early success in D.C., Schweizer asks: “Why are these leaders not willing to take steps to address it and deal with it?”
Trump has announced plans to take on crime in other large cities such as Chicago, though his legal authority to do so is questionable and the city and state leaders have loudly denounced him for even threatening to intervene.
Are the overwhelmingly Democratic city and state leaders in California, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan comfortable tolerating their high levels of crime?
Democrats say that crime in the District is at a 30-year low. But that’s not the whole story.
“You find out that a D.C. police commander is under investigation for making changes to the crime statistics. The police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data,” co-host Eric Eggers says. He quotes the head of the police union, who said “our members respond to the scene of a felony offense, and they get pressure from a lieutenant or captain to write it up in a different way, so it falls into a different [less serious] classification.”
Schweizer says, “That doesn’t mean that crime is down. It just means that they’re just encouraging people to tolerate it more and they don’t want it to be known how bad it is.”
“The larger issue is not just that there’s a cooking of the books,” Schweizer says. “It’s that Americans generally have become less likely to report crimes, even violent crimes, because they feel like they’re either not going to get justice, or it’s going to take too long, or there are going to be some other complications… The Justice Department national crime victim survey found that 45 percent of violent crimes in America never get reported to the police.” Neither do 69 percent of all property crimes.
Besides a loss of public trust in the police, a related reason is that police forces in big cities are having staffing shortages and retention problems. Schweizer and Eggers say those problems have grown more acute since the 2020 riots after the death of George Floyd while he was being arrested in Minneapolis. Politicians in big cities became loudly anti-police, threatened to “defund” police forces, and crime surged.
Finally, victims of crime in America’s large cities are disproportionately black and live in lower-income areas. These citizens are less likely to vote, yet the stakes for them are higher. Black people are 22 times more likely to be killed than white people in large U.S. cities.
Schweizer and Eggers also point out the hypocrisy of blue-state governors. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois has pushed back on Trump’s idea to deploy the National Guard to Chicago where violent crime is rampant, yet he himself called out the state’s National Guard to protect Democrats who were in the city for their party’s convention.
In California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has tried to rebrand himself as a foil to Trump, Newsom called out the state’s National Guard to help clean up the homeless population in San Francisco right before a visit to that city by Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping. Bewildered San Franciscans wondered why they can’t get that kind of service when President Xi isn’t in town.
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