President Trump’s emergency control over the DC police ended last week. Isn’t it curious you haven’t heard much about that lately? That’s probably because it worked. NPR ran this segment a few days ago.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: I head first to the Southeast D.C. neighborhood of Congress Heights, an area with high poverty and a history of high crime. Thirty-two-year-old Michael Jackson (ph) is waiting for a bus in a yellow vest for his job in maintenance and cleanup. He also lives nearby and says he’s seen positive change the past month.
MICHAEL JACKSON: No more hanging out. You don’t hear a lot of gun noises, a lot of gunshots. It’s a lot more peaceful.
LUDDEN: D.C.’s police department says violent crime during the surge fell 39% compared to the same time period last year. Jackson thinks the amped-up security sent a message to would-be criminals.
JACKSON: Do they really want to be involved with the ATF, FBI? So that gave criminals a chance to think, like, do the right thing.
But NPR was able to find several progressives who said they felt unsafe.
LUDDEN: D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says local police will no longer work alongside federal immigration agents. Around the corner, I chat with Abigail Friedman. She had a career in the State Department and is retired now – probably exactly who you’d think would feel reassured by more security forces, she says, but she did not.
ABIGAIL FRIEDMAN: Really unsettling. I didn’t feel safe. I felt like things could happen to me or to any of my neighbors or friends any time. Things could get out of hand.
At least they covered it. A lot of news outlets seem to have decided to just skit it altogether. The Washington Post was an exception. They ran a big story tallying up all the arrests made by federal agents over the past month.
The White House has touted the success of the operation, saying it drove down crime and took illegal guns off the streets. But they’ve offered little insight into who was being arrested, how, where and for what.
To answer those questions, The Washington Post gathered more than a thousand charging documents from local and federal courts, mapped the incidents and examined how they played out. The documents portray an expanded law enforcement presence that considered no crime too small while hunting for guns and employing tactics that have sparked community opposition in the past…
Those arrests occurred in all eight city wards, but were concentrated in the city’s poorest, least White and most crime-ridden neighborhoods.
Targeting the most crime-ridden neighborhoods seems like a good idea. But the real question is did it work. The Post suggests the answer depends on who you ask.
Interpretations vary on how that work is impacting the city. The mayor sees progress, sprinkled with causes for concern. A magistrate judge sees trampled rights. A police advocate sees an effective operation removing guns from the street. Protesters see federal overreach that does little to address the root causes of crime.
The president sees a rescued city ― and perhaps a blueprint to replicate across the nation.
If you keep plowing through the story about police tactics and pretext stops you eventually get to something which seems like the buried lede. I counted and this is paragraph 38 out of 50.
There were six homicides in D.C. during the four weeks examined by The Post — from Aug. 7, when Trump first ordered a boosted federal presence, through Sept. 4. That’s eight fewer homicides than the same period last year, according to D.C. police data. Robberies more than halved and carjackings plummeted.
Six homicides instead of 14 homicides seems like good news but the Post closes the story with a claim that the decline doesn’t really count.
“They are only deferring and displacing crime — not really reducing it at its core. Only social and economic conditions can do that,” said Randell Strickland, 57, a neighborhood commissioner in Ward 8 who’s on the board of a gun-violence-prevention nonprofit.
There’s a similar argument being made in the Atlantic. It’s titled “The Coming D.C. Crime Boomerang.” The argument seems to be that, yes, the surge of police worked in the short term but just wait. All those crimes will still happen once it ends.
Here’s a thought. Don’t let it end. Keep the pressure on the violent crooks and degenerates until they decide they need to move away from Washington, DC if they really want to kill someone.
For the most part I think progressives really don’t want to admit that this strategy worked. They’d much rather keep hoping that it fails at some point in the future so they can return to saying tough policing doesn’t fix crime problem or you can’t arrest your way out of the problem or some similar nonsense. What we’ve just seen is that it does fix the problem so there’s no reason to tolerate the higher crime rate that people were taking for granted.
Editor’s Note: The days of lawlessness in Washington, D.C. are over. Thanks to President Trump, our nation’s capital will be SAFE once again.
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