Crime and credit

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next, cracking down on crime.

The Trump administration’s takeover of policing in Washington, D.C. is showing results that even the city’s Democratic mayor admits are significant.

Those gains come as violent crime rates have been declining nationwide, but as one analyst puts it: better national averages don’t mean much if murders are still happening on your street corner. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has our report.

TRUMP: Everybody was getting hit and mugged. You people could not walk to your office without security. That’s how unsafe it was.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: President Donald Trump there speaking to members of the press last week. He claims that Washington, D.C., was incredibly unsafe before he deployed the National Guard and federal agents to the streets of the capital last month. Since then, the city’s Democratic Mayor, Muriel Bowser, admits crime has dropped.

BOWSER: The difference between this period, this 20 day period of this federal surge and last year represents a 87% reduction in carjackings in Washington, DC. We know that when carjackings go down, when use of gun[s] goes down, when homicide or robbery go down, neighborhoods feel safer and are safer. So this surge has been important to us.

But even before Trump deployed the National Guard, crimes such as assault, homicide, and robbery were on the decline in Washington and the rest of the country.

LOPEZ: I would not attribute anything directly to the Trump administration, without this evidence, and likewise, necessarily even to the Biden administration.

Ernesto Lopez is a research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice. He says that the data shows violent crime has been dropping since a massive spike during the COVID-19 pandemic.

LOPEZ: With homicide, there was a major about nationally, about a 30% increase from 2019 to 2020 and looking at the full year, and then there's a smaller increase, I believe it's about 5% from 2020 2021 maybe a little smaller, 2022 and then starts to bend downward a bit, and so but it looks like probably, I'd say, probably around starting 2024 you start to see some larger decreases, and then 2025, again, larger decreases.

Lopez says that there are many factors that could explain the drop. Things like shifting drug markets, or returning neighborhood violence prevention programs

While Lopez acknowledges that crime hasn’t decreased everywhere at the same rate, it has decreased by and large across the country.

LOPEZ: There's always going to be variation. Whenever you're looking at data, there's always going to be some cities that go up and some cities that go down, and some cities have declined in homicide much sooner than other cities.

President Trump doubts that data:

TRUMP: And I’m tired of listening to all these people say how safe it was before we got here. It was unsafe. It was horrible.

Vice President JD Vance points to the dramatic reduction in homicide rates since the administration deployed the National Guard in Washington D.C.

VANCE: This, town averaged one murder every other day for the last 20-30, years, which means that it's two short weeks the President and the team have saved six or seven lives, people who would have been killed on the streets of DC who are now living, breathing, spending time with their families, because the President had the willpower to say, no more.

When he was first deploying the National Guard to Washington D.C., Trump said that the city’s murder rate was worse than anywhere else in the world.

TRUMP: The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth. Much higher. This is much higher.

The data does show that the United States homicide rate is as much as 7 times higher than similarly wealthy and industrialized countries.

But crime statistics themselves have come under greater scrutiny over the last decade,with well-publicized instances of miscategorizing crimes or changing definitions in places like Buckeye, Arizona, and New York City.

More recently the Department of Justice has been investigating Washington D.C.’s police department for allegedly falsifying crime statistics to make the city appear safer.

Zack Smith is a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

SMITH: Local DC police union officials have reported that many of their members have experienced a scenario where they respond to the scene of a violent crime, and shortly afterwards, a higher ranking police official will show up and order the officers on the scene to take a report for a less serious offense, essentially artificially making it look like crime, particularly violent crime, is not as bad as it may seem.

Washington D.C.’s police department did not respond to WORLD’s request for comment regarding those allegations.

But Ernesto Lopez of the Council on Criminal Justice says that, while crime data may not be perfect, the trending line is consistent nationwide. He says it’s been measurably decreasing.

SMITH: We’re seeing that most crimes are falling to below pre-pandemic levels - so, pre-2020 levels.

The CATO Institute’s Mike Fox says that may be true, but it doesn’t mean much to someone living in a high-crime neighborhood.

FOX: So like, D.C., yeah, the crime rates overall are considerably lower this year than they were last year, and they're considerably lower last year they were in 2023. Yet, you know, when I see that there's routine violence in the neighborhood, I don't necessarily feel safe, and other people don't necessarily feel safe, so telling them that the murder rate went down. Doesn't really help when you know you're witnessing homicides on the street corner.

Yet Fox isn’t a fan of flooding D.C. with National Guard personnel and federal agents. He says they’re too focused on the symptoms and not really addressing the root causes.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is touting hundreds of arrests. Many of those have been for illegal firearm possession, drug offenses, and arrests of illegal immigrants.

Last week in the Oval Office President Trump announced that since he mobilized the National Guard, Washington, D.C. has seen a massive decrease in homicides.

TRUMP: In the last eleven days—again, I hate to say it because it sounds so ridiculous—but in the last eleven days we’ve had no murders. And that’s the first time that’s taken place in years, actually.

That statistic has emboldened the President to consider deploying the National Guard to other cities in the United States, naming Chicago and New York as possible destinations.

TRUMP: And after we do this we’ll go to another location and we’ll make it safe also. We’re gonna make our country very safe and we’re gonna make our cities very safe also.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

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