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by rdl·1y ago·view on hn ↗
If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.

(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)

14 comments
For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.

Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).

Democracy gets traded for dictatorship because someone shows up and says "I might not be perfect but I'm a hell of a lot better than these schmucks who've been ruining things". And when that person saying that stuff shows up at a point in time when the people who have been in charge of things have run the country into the ground with wars, debts and policies that give people no hope that things will get better, it's a pretty compelling message.
It would be, if it were true. But the premise isn't true and the solution isn't true either. It just sounds good and people tend to respond from fear and other emotions rather than rationality.
Except that person is also the person who add 1/6 of the debt just himself and is doing it again just to make the wealthy wealthier.
> I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them

What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.

Trump is not fighting crime. He's fighting anything that doesn't kowtow to Trump.
The criminal justice system is racist. The solution to crime is more complicated than “let all the criminals go” but sending in the National Guard is definitely not the solution. Also, given the current state of affairs, this will be forgotten about — because Trump will do something even more outrageously authoritarian. And your $100 won’t help when the regime kidnaps me out of my home.
>will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.

Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...

>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)

Of course: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise.

The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.

This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.
If they're aren't any records of the crime, in their minds then the crime never occurred, including the crime perpetuated by government agents against civilians.
> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low.

Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?

Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.

You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics.

One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown. ^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.

Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.

Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.

One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.

Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).

So your position is that the police are untrustworthy and abuse their power?
> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low.

If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.

Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda.

HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.

There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.
I hope you don’t find yourself in one of the out groups in the fascist state you seem so eager for. There’s a reason you don’t turn the military on the citizenry. They’re for fighting the enemies of the nation and the police are for maintaining order. When the military become the police, the citizenry become the enemy of the nation.
Costa Rica (a country my wife and I are seriously looking at moving to in retirement and planning to spend a couple of months there every year starting next year) famously doesn’t have a military to prevent military coups and to put more money into their excellent universal health care system among other things.
Look at the UK experience in Northern Ireland - not something to be emulated.
When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC

I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.

Oh, you just have to look around the world to see how effectively a dictator's deployment of national armed force reduces the official crime statistics. There's absolutely positively zero doubt in mind that will be a reported outcome :-)
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC

Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.

It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.

If you're lucky.
> Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.

Unless you have personal political clout, this is True for any nation.

> (I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)

Alternatively, we could just make DC a state, which I'm broadly in favor of.

The whole point of the District of Columbia not being a state is that the United States is an equal compact between the states, and it would not be fair for the seat of the federal government to be in a state. So I'm a hard pass on DC statehood. I find GP's suggestion better.

Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?

The crime rates in DC have been dramatically falling over the last couple years, just as they have been falling across most cities in the country for the last couple decades.
For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.

What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.

Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.

The idea is that with more police presence, criminals will think twice before attempting anything. Standing around is part of this.

A good example of this is NYC around 2000. It worked.

"So bad"? They're nineteenth in terms of highest murder rate among US cities. The rate had been falling for over a decade, save a brief spike in 2023.
The capital of a country, especially one in a special status like Washington DC, should be a shinning star of perfection, nit in the top 20 hell holes you'd never want to be caught dead in at midnight alone.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-cri... - August 10th, 2025

Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-... - January 3rd, 2025 (My note: Published by this admin's DoJ in January of this year)

DC Metro Police 2025 Year-to-Date Crime Comparison - https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance

But Washington is clearly reigned by a criminal
> [...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.

DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.

The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.

> DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe.

DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.

"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."

Poverty is the underlying driver of most crime. Poverty, in turn, is the result of wealth hoarding by the ruling class.

Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.

Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.

> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions

Every action taken by a police organization is per se a political action. That's why "police" are called that.