Trump's Real Endgame With Crime in DC Is Coming Into View
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According to President Donald Trump, Washington, DC, is a hellscape. It's ridden with crime driven by “ bloodthirsty criminals ” and “roving mobs of wild youth,” so the White House is intervening. The president, supervising the DC mayor and local law enforcement, has decided to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to our nation's capital. There's just one glaring problem with this narrative: Violent crime in DC has been declining and is on track to hit a 30-year low .
On Tuesday during a White House press briefing, Trump, flanked by members of his Cabinet, announced that 800 National Guard troops would be deployed to DC to restore “law, order, and public safety.” He referenced a 19-year-old staffer of the Department of Government Efficiency—famously known as “Big Balls”—who was reportedly recently attacked in a carjacking. Leveraging the federal government's authority over the district, the president is expected to order the National Guard to remain in DC for at least the next 30 days.
The reality of what's happening in DC is not quite as bleak as Trump would have us believe, according to Thomas Abt , founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. He's authored a book about urban violence and how to combat it, and is also a senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice in DC I spoke with him to understand what to make of DC's crime and how the Trump administration is attempting to solve it. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Shirin Ali: The president claimed that Washington, DC, has a higher murder rate than some of the worst places in the world. Is that true?
Thomas Abt: The best way to compare crime rates is per 100,000 residents, so that you're getting an apples-to-apples number and it's not thrown off by the size of the jurisdiction. For the latest official data we have for 2024, DC had 187 homicides, and that converts to about 27 homicides for every 100,000 residents. That is significantly above the average for large cities, which is slightly over 10. It doesn't put DC in the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States, but it is significantly above average.
I think that it's important to have a nuanced response to a lot of the fear mongering that has been happening. There is cause for concern when it comes to crime in DC, but the timing of the president's announcement is questionable, considering that there have been dramatic drops in homicide, assaults with deadly weapons, robberies, and other violent crime, significantly over the past 18 months. The question is, why do this now? Various measures of crime peaked in DC in 2023, and that was disturbing, because at the time nationally, the crime wave was starting to ebb, and DC was still going up. Ultimately, DC has conformed to the trend and is now actually reducing crime. In fact, crime is falling faster in DC than it is in other places.
The DC crime story is very difficult to explain because DC doesn't do very well on crime, but on the face of it, they seem to be doing a lot of the right things. They have the Community Bridges Inc. program and they have policing programs. Ultimately, what is plaguing DC is poor implementation and poor coordination. One of the things I always say is that fighting crime is a team sport, and if all the players are not working well together, then the team can't be successful. That type of coordination is hard in every city, but it's especially hard in DC, which is a federal–local hybrid.
How does Washington, DC's crime rate compare to other US cities?
Many of the cities that are perennially on top of the list, and are usually vying for murder capital of the United States, are Memphis, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Detroit. Much is made of Chicago's crime rate, which is significantly higher than its sister cities of Los Angeles and New York, but is often not actually in the top 10. They're just outside of it.
I think Chicago gets a lot of attention because it's such a large city. You can get these stories like “40 Shot Over Memorial Day Weekend” or something like that, but that's also a function of size, not just of violence. Those other cities I mentioned are all sort of constantly in the mix in terms of most violent cities.
Trump emphasized juvenile crime in DC, characterizing it as “roving mobs of wild youth.” What is actually the state of juvenile crime in DC?
In DC and in other places around the country, youth crime gets a lot of attention. That said, in DC, there are certain types of crime that seem to be very much associated with youth, and carjackings are one of them. In 2024, less than 8 percent of all arrests in DC were for juveniles, but more than half of carjacking arrests involved juveniles. However, carjackings are dropping significantly in the district. It's really important to understand that youth crime is important, but it is often not driving the numbers in DC, or any other city.
There was an analysis done in DC recently that went into granular depth on the district's gun violence problem. It found, as we find in every city, that gun violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by adults. The average age of a perpetrator could be in their mid-to-late 20s, as is the average age of a victim, and youth rarely account for more than 15 to 20 percent, at the most, of homicides or nonfatal shootings. There are issues in DC with youth crime, and it makes people uncomfortable when there's lots of kids out on the street and they're sometimes getting into fights. And of course there are anecdotal episodes of kids doing terrible things, and there are improvements that could be made in family court, but the idea that youth crime is driving the overall DC crime picture, with the exception of carjackings, is just not consistent with the data.
Jeanine Pirro, US attorney for Washington, DC, said she wants to “change the law” so youth in their early teens could face criminal charges and be prosecuted as adults. What do you make of that?
That's a complicated question, and I think the evidence on it is quite limited. I think that there are jurisdictions that are too permissive in terms of juvenile crime, but you can also go too far and be overly punitive. The most important thing to understand about punishment is that the evidence clearly shows that the swiftness and the certainty of the punishment matter much more than the ultimate severity. What that means is, it's much more important that the message on the street is that you're going to get caught and you're going to get punished, not so much: Is it three years? Is it five years? Is it this, or is it that? That's why, for instance, we have very good evidence showing that the death penalty has no deterrent effect. The reason is because it's a very severe punishment that's administered in a very uneven way, and so people have no real sense of whether they would get the death penalty, and it certainly doesn't happen quickly.
The real issue is not so much whether they're prosecuted as adults, it's bail set. And that has been an ongoing issue in DC and in other places. When people understand that they're arrested for an offense, and if they're a likely flight risk or a threat to the community so they're held in custody during the pendency of their case, that can be a very effective deterrent. Because otherwise, sometimes the implicit message is, you're arrested and 12 hours later you're back on the street again. They wag their finger at you and you have some short date way off in the future. It can feel like you got away with it. I think that's much more the issue, and the DC City Council has recently strengthened the laws regarding lease, but some of it is up to the US attorney, who is a federal official.
We looked at this issue a lot over the past few years, because cash bail, or bail reform, has been a bogeyman that has been attacked by the right and used as a sort of cudgel against the left. Here's the issue: Bail reform has happened in a handful of jurisdictions, and those jurisdictions are not following any clear pattern in terms of big crime spikes. For instance, during the time that bail reform was being implemented, crime was on the rise in many cities, but it was also going up in cities without bail reform. It's not clear that bail reform in particular is driving changes in crime. The tough thing about this is there's a lot of nuance, and the best way to think about a criminal justice system is to think about it like an old-school stereo. Stereos used to have an amplifier and then a turntable and then speakers and all of these different things. Salespeople would always tell you—in an effort to upsell you, but it was true—that the system will only sound as good as its worst component. That's true of the overall criminal justice system in DC and everywhere else. It's an ecosystem and everything is interconnected. Bail reform does certainly play a role, but there are other factors too.
Do you think the National Guard will be able to accomplish anything, in terms of crime?
I think the issue with the Guardsmen and the other federal agents is that this is a very popular strategy called a surge. It's a temporary flood of enforcement resources into a jurisdiction. Now, you may temporarily see a benefit from this flood, simply through deterrence. But it's very costly, and it's also not sustainable, as it's not likely to be successful over the long run, because it's ultimately not improving the performance of the criminal justice system. It's also not addressing the underlying causes of crime. Inevitably, what happens with these surges, whether or not they're temporarily successful, is they have to end at some point, and then things just go back to normal. The other thing I'm worried about here is that Trump said this is a test run for other cities. Well, crime is already dropping significantly in DC and it looks like it's likely to drop further. Is he going to take credit for more crime dropping? Then go to other cities where crime is falling and take credit there? And using that as a justification for more authoritarian and undemocratic practices? It's really troubling to me.
It's certainly unclear how National Guardsmen, without arrest authority and without investigative authority, are going to do much in this space. It's also unclear how other federal agents can help beyond their traditional roles and how Attorney General Pam Bondi and the head of Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole, neither of whom have any local law enforcement experience, are going to do better than Pam Smith, the current chief of the DC police department. She's overseen a large crime reduction over the last 18 months. We have to stop playing politics with with this issue, which this really does seem to be about.
What actually helps crime go down?
If you boil down all of the most rigorous research and look at which strategies are successful and what they collectively have in common, it comes down to three fundamental principles of violence reduction: Focus, balance, and fairness. Focus means that you focus on the highest-risk people and places, and you don't have overbroad, generalized solutions. You identify those people who are disproportionately causing the crime and violence and you have targeted strategies for them. You also have targeted strategies to the microlocations, known as hot spots, where crime is concentrating. This is important because targeted strategies are generally more successful than untargeted strategies, because of all of the collateral negative consequences of overbroad strategies that can end up stigmatizing entire groups of people and entire communities with a broad brush of violence and violent responses. In reality, it's always a few people in a few places. Violent crime is hyperconcentrated in every city in the United States.
The second thing is to be balanced. If you look at the hundreds of strategies that have been used to reduce crime and violence, you're going to see examples of very aggressive strategies that have been successful and preventative soft strategies that have been successful. There is not in the literature a strong preference for enforcement versus prevention, because there are positive and negative examples of both. The two need to complement one another, and in every strategy, you need to engage these people in places with the highest risk for violence with a combination of empathy and accountability. There have to be carrots and there have to be sticks. This is somewhat common sense. When we raise our children, we don't raise them with all punishments or all rewards. We're doing a combination to maximize behavior change. Adults are no different, and so you need a balanced set of strategies with these highest-risk people and places.
The last thing is fairness. If we've learned anything since 2016, it's about the importance of fairness, and that really means keeping those who are most impacted by violence involved in the policymaking process at every stage. If you look at this latest effort by the Trump administration, it is massively unfocused. It has no targeting that we know of, and it's certainly not targeted towards specific people or specific places. It's completely unbalanced. It's focused exclusively on enforcement, and it will be largely perceived by the people of DC as unfair because they were not consulted. The mayor herself and the police chief herself were given no notice, which is outrageous.
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