Washington DC, August 19, 2025 --  

Partisans claim that Washington DC is either a crime-ridden hell hole or a city with the lowest crime in 30 years. Don't believe the hype.

Trump's stationing of the National Guard on the Mall makes for a great photo op, even if it does little to fight crime. Washington's monumental core has long been one of the safest parts of the city, but sadly this kind of safety is not universal in Washington. Two miles away are the poor and often violent neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city. Drug gangs in these areas engage in endless retaliatory shootings driving the bulk of Washington's 190 murders last year.¹

Where are the criminals here? Photo ©2025 David G. Young

While still bad, murders are down from a spike in 2023, when 274 homicides were reported.² Yet almost any news article from the New York Times, Washington Post, or any other left-leaning news outlet repeats a dubious mantra that Washington DC's crime rate is at a 30 year low. Nonsense. The source of that statistic is a slide deck from a US Attorney for the District of Colombia press conference in January.³ It cites no data for this 30-year comparison, and the claim is crazy.

Let's be clear: things were not good 30 years ago. DC crime was at its all time high from the violence from the crack cocaine era. The all time peak was 509 murders in 1991 and by 1994 murders had declined slightly to 437⁴.

Since that peak era, the true low point came in 2012 when only 88 murders were recorded⁵. Murders began rising again as the opioid epidemic hit the city. An honest statisticians might say that Washington's 2024 murder count was the lowest in five years. But why claim only five years when you can use lies and falsifications to claim 30?

Sources: Metropolitan Police Department, St. Louis Federal Reserve / Census Bureau for Population.

Politicians and police department leaders have been cooking the books to hide the crime problem since at least 2020. The pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement both hurt police morale, and the Metropolitan Police Department's force has declined ever since.⁶ DC's weakened police force has all but ended traffic stops, and visibly reduced patrolling. Unsurprisingly, crime spiked.

The police union claims leadership dishonestly reclassifies violent crime cases as suspicion to commit violent crime cases, making actual violent crime appear down. One police commander was suspended earlier this year and is being investigated for such fraud.⁷ The Trump Justice Department is now investigating this allegation, a move that is likely to turn what should have been an important anti-corruption case into a political fiasco.⁸

Politicians' indifference to the crime spike has also caused political blowback in traditionally safe neighborhoods where carjackings and muggings became common in the wake of the pandemic. Residents filed two law-and-order recall petitions against two soft-on-crime DC council members that has attempted to replace the criminal code with one that reduced sentences.⁹ These recalls failed at the polls last November, thanks to DC's do-gooder electorate which sees criminals and drug addicts as victims of society.

Conventional wisdom among residents is that crime is actually down compared to the spike in 2023. But by how much? Given allegations that DC is falsifying violent crime stats for political purposes, it is best to ignore the fuzzy “violent crime” stats in favor of a harder metric: the murder count. (Dead bodies are harder to hide than numbers in a spreadsheet.) Note from the charts that murder and violent crime counts tracked closely for over a decade before suspiciously diverging in recent years.

DC voters should give city leaders a swift kick in the pants for hiding the truth and coddling troublemakers. But don't expect that to happen now that lefty Washingtonians are rallying behind their city against Trump administration meddling.

And as for Trump's promise to end crime in DC and investigate MPD falsification of stats? Don't hold your breath. The Trump administration has shown itself even more prone to use statistical lies and visual theatrics for political gain. Is DC really a lawless hellhole being saved by the National Guard and federal police? This author had to ride his bike for more than six miles around the city (seeing no crime along the way) just to spot one group of three national Guardsmen on the northern edge of the Mall. Consider that there are only 815 members of the DC guard and a few hundred federal police compared with nearly 5500 officers in the MPD and Capitol Police departments.¹⁰ How can these meager reinforcements possibly make a difference?

The end game in Washington DC is likely to be far less exciting than the dystopian visions of left-wing and right-wing Americans. As soon as the ugly homeless encampments are cleared along the motorcade route between the White House and the Trump National Gold Club, expect the President to declare a great victory eliminating crime in DC and shift focus on the next shiny thing in his line of vision.

Notes:

1. WTOP, DC Carjackings and Homicides See Dramatic Drop in 2024, January 1, 2025

2. ibid.

3. US Attorneys Office District of Columbia, Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low, January 3, 2025

4. Metropolitan Police Department, Annual Reports, 1991-2023

5. Ibid.

6. NBC 4 Washington, DC Police Expect Slight Increase in Officers Next Fiscal Year, Reversing Trend, April 9, 2024

7. NBC 4 Washington, DC Police Commander Suspended, Accused of Changing Crime Statistics, July 18, 2024

8. WTOP, Trump's Justice Department is Investigating Whether DC Police Officials Falsified Crime Data, August 19, 2025

9. Washingtonian, Crime Is Up in DC. Are Recall Efforts Against Councilmembers the Solution?, March 1, 2024

10. Washington Post, Where National Guard Troops and Federal Agents are Posted, August 15, 2025