Washington, D.C., has a crime problem.
As a report in Vox put it last month, in 2023, “DC saw its deadliest year in more than two decades, with 274 people killed and a homicide rate that makes it among the deadliest cities in the country.” While violent crime has plunged elsewhere, according to Vox, it “spiked nearly 40 percent in the nation’s capital.”
And if Donald Trump has his way, Washington, D.C.’s crime problem will become a political problem for Democrats in 2024. He intends to use it, along with the problem of migration along the nation’s southern border, to portray them as soft on crime, and indifferent to the suffering it inflicts on ordinary Americans.
Earlier this month, Trump promised that if he is returned to the White House, he will undertake a “federal takeover of this filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”
As NBC News reports, “Trump repeatedly promised to essentially occupy the capital with federal troops, a tactic he flirted with during the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in his final year in office, telling a conservative audience last year, ‘I will send in the National Guard until law and order is restored’ and that he ‘wouldn’t even call the mayor.’”
Trump presents what the New York Times calls “a dark, often dystopian, vision of an America that is ravaged by crime, building on his message in 2020 that the nation’s cities were decaying.” He wants to seize the mantle of “law-and-order” and blame America’s problems on “progressive politicians, activists and policies.”
He is aided in this effort by Republican politicians and coverage on Fox News, which, as Vox says, make “DC’s struggles with crime … a partisan flashpoint, a key talking point” for those who want to “use the city’s struggles as an opportunity to criticize its Democratic leaders.” Joe Biden cannot afford to stand by idly as Trump and his allies target DC’s crime problem and try to make it into a national issue.
This is not to say that the crime problem in Washington, D.C., is not serious. It is.
CNN reports that it “stealing a sense of security” from its residents, where violent crime increased 39 percent last year. “Homicides, carjackings and robberies across Washington, DC, have affected prominent politicians and regular residents alike, leaving many in the nation’s capital fearful of the rising crime.”
There have already been 57 carjackings in the city in 2024, 30 of which involved firearms. And there have only been eight arrests in those cases. So far this year, there have been 22 murders and 132 assaults with a deadly weapon.
But despite what Trump would like people to believe, the D.C. crime problem difference cannot be laid at the feet of progressives or policies that hinder law enforcement.
In recent years, USA Today notes, Washington, D.C., has “hired more police officers than any other city in the country, retaining 5.7 officers for every 1,000 citizens in 2022, or 3.3 more than the national average.” Mayor Muriel Bowser has “vowed to bring police enrollment up to 4,000.”
Nonetheless, Trump wants to highlight D.C.’s crime problem without acknowledging that it is an outlier in comparison with what is happening elsewhere in the United States.
“The nation’s five largest cities,” USA Today observes, “saw a decline in killings last year. From 2022 to 2023, homicide rates dropped 11.9% in New York, 16.4% in Los Angeles, 13% in Chicago, 20% in Houston and 22% in Phoenix, according to those police departments’ internal statistics.”
According to a Feb. 12 NPR story “The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline … in 2023 relative to 2022. … Instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.”
Despite this good news, the Biden campaign will be encountering headwinds on the crime issue, just like he will be encountering on the economy, because what people think about the country’s crime problem has not caught up with the facts on the ground.
A November 2023 Gallup poll drives this point home.
“More than three-quarters of Americans, 77%, believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago, and a majority, 55%, say the same about crime in their local area. Both figures are similar to what Gallup measured last year and rank among the most pessimistic readings in the respective trends.”
In addition, “Sixty-three percent of Americans describe the crime problem in the U.S. as either extremely or very serious, up from 54% when last measured in 2021 and the highest in Gallup’s trend. The prior high of 60% was recorded in the initial 2000 reading, as well as in 2010 and 2016.”
Respondents to another poll said “Trump would better handle crime and violence with him leading Biden by 21 points.”
The former president will beat up on the D.C. crime problem to fan that perception, in the hopes he can frighten voters to his side.
If Joe Biden wants to win, he will need to take on the crime issue. The president must show that he understands and cares about law and order, even as he renews his promise to promote criminal justice reform. He will need to portray the D.C. crime problem for what it is: an outlier among sharp nationwide declines in violent crime.
NBC News suggests that Biden has gotten the message.
“The White House,” it says, “is more broadly preparing to intensify its criticism of Republicans on crime, with plans to highlight some GOP efforts to cut the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS program; oppose an assault weapons ban; and defund the FBI. The White House plans to argue that by proposing that federal spending return to 2022 levels, for instance, Republicans would cut funding for programs that fight crime.”
As the 2024 campaign goes on, Biden can thread the needle by distancing himself from the remnants of the politically damaging progressive movement to defund-the-police while showing that he knows how violent crime shapes the lives of people who fear it and that he has plans to do something about it.
He can show himself to be sympathetic to progressive critiques of racism in law enforcement and the criminal justice system, but also take executive action to deal with chaos on the southern border. Comparing the results of the 2023 mayoral contest in Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot got only 17 percent of the vote in an election dominated by the crime issue, with the results of this month’s special election for Congress in New York shows the political benefits of doing so.
Despite the seriousness of D.C.’s crime problem and Trump’s desire to use it to fuel his campaign, I hope that Democratic strategist Lis Smith is right when she says about that problem, “If Republicans (think) President Biden would hand them a wedge issue for 2024, they (think) wrong.”
Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Amherst College.