Mother Jones
Breaking Down the White House’s Lies and Distortions About Crime in DC
This story was originally published by The Watch, Radley Balko’s substack publication, to which you can subscribe here.
So let’s get this out of the way first: As I wrote in a previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, DC, is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year.
That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to DC is a lie.
In defense of President Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in the nation’s capital, the White House has put out a “fact sheet” of scary statistics on crime in Washington, DC.
It’s about what you’d expect: a bunch of brazen, lazy, easily disproven garbage. Which of course isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is that they’ve actually linked to the sources that disprove their lies.
The lying starts with the first bullet point:
- In 2024, Washington, D.C. saw a homicide rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents.
- That was the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country—nearly six times higher than New York City and also higher than Atlanta, Chicago, and Compton.
Nope. The linked study is only a sampling of 23 cities. It does not purport to be a list of the 23 most dangerous or murderous or crime-ridden cities. It does not purport to be a comprehensive list of any kind. The point of the study was to compare year-over-year statistics among a diverse selection of cities around the country. DC’s homicide rate was the fourth highest out of these 23 cities. Not out of all US cities.
This first bullet point also fails to contextualize the 27.3 per 100,000 figure for 2024. It was down from 39 in 2023. It’s on track to go down further, to about 22.7 this year. This matters, because Trump’s argument is that crime in the city is out of control due to poor leadership. That isn’t what’s happening.
Trump has also claimed that homicides in DC in 2023 were the “highest ever.” Not even close. The city’s murder rate topped 80 per 100,000 in 1991.
A surge of heavily armed troops is not going to fix any of DC’s problems— and it certainly won’t make residents more trustful of law enforcement.
As of April, DC’s murder rate this year ranked not fourth highest, but 19th. It ranked behind red state cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Tulsa.
Again, the whole point of the study the White House itself cited was to compare year-over-year homicide stats—to see which cities improved from 2023 to 2024. And here, DC comes out very well. Of the 23 cities the study surveyed, DC had the fourth-highest drop in its homicide rate from 2023 to 2024.
One of the four cities that had an even bigger drop was Oakland. Trump has said he wants to send troops there, too. Seven of the 23 cities in the study cited by the White House actually showed an increase in homicides last year. Four of those—including the top two (Indianapolis and Lexington, Kentucky) are in red states. The city with the largest increase—Lexington—has a Republican mayor. Send the National Guard to Lexington!
Omaha is also among the seven cities that saw an increase in homicides. It, too, had a Republican mayor until this year.
- If Washington, D.C. was a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation.
This is true of nearly every large city in the country. Most cities have higher crime rates than most states because cities have more density.
But if you want to compare states, we can do that. Six of the seven states with the highest homicide rates are all deep red, and 17 of the 21 highest crime rate states all voted for Trump in 2024.
- In 2012, the homicide rate in Washington, D.C. was just 13.9 per 100,000 residents.
This is true. And Washington, DC, had a Democratic mayor and city council then, too.
Also, guess who was president? Guess who was president in 2014, when the country hit its lowest recorded homicide rate since the 1950s?
This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.
Here I’ll add my usual caveat that, with a few exceptions, I don’t think presidents have much effect on crime. I’m not convinced executive branch leaders at any level of government do. But Trump has spent much of the last decade blaming Obama, Biden, and Democrats for crime. So it’s worth pointing out that crime rose under his watch, while it fell under Obama and Biden. And more generally, blue states have less crime than red states.
- Washington, D.C.’s murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba.
Comparing the crime rate of a US city to a city in an authoritarian country in a way that’s favorable to the authoritarian country is…an interesting choice. But if we’re going to go the route of deferring to official stats from totalitarian states, Pyongyang’s official crime rate is zero. But let’s not give them any ideas.
Trump also claimed at his press conference that DC was “number one in the world” for homicides. That isn’t remotely true. Again, it isn’t even among the top 10 big cities in the US.
It’s neither helpful nor revelatory to compare crime rates in the US to those of countries with vastly different laws, values, histories, economies, and methods of measuring crime.
- The number of juveniles arrested in Washington, D.C., has gone up each year since 2020—many of whom have had prior arrests for violent crimes.
They’re arresting more kids, even as crime drops? I thought the problem was that DC leaders were soft on crime? Which is it?
In any case, this figure also sorely lacks context. From the NY Times:
According to data compiled by [Washington, DC’s] Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, the police made about 1,500 arrests of children in 2020; 1,400 in 2021; 1,700 in 2022; 2,200 in 2023; and 2,000 in 2024. Juvenile arrests totaled 1,128 through the first half of 2025, compared with 1,114 in the first half of 2024.
In comparison, the police arrested 2,300 to 2,900 youths annually from 2016 to 2019 and 3,400 to 4,000 annually from 2006 to 2010.
It’s not surprising that there was an increase in these arrests in the years following the pandemic. A lot of people—including kids—stayed home in 2020. Police staffing plummeted, meaning there were fewer officers to make arrests. Schools were closed. It only makes sense that arrests ticked up as things started to return to normal.
But DC police are still arresting far fewer youths than they were prior to the pandemic.
I’d also just add that it’s a little twisted to be talking about how we need to arrest more children. In the local news article linked by the White House, local officials say a good percentage of the increase in youth arrests were driven by fights at school. Fights at school happen. It happened quite a bit when I was growing up—probably a few times per week at my my small, all-white high school. Not a single one of those fights resulted in an arrest. But then, we didn’t have cops roving the hallways, either.
- There were 29,348 crimes reported in Washington, D.C. last year, including 3,469 violent offenses, 1,026 assaults with a dangerous weapon, 2,113 robberies, and 5,139 motor vehicle thefts.
All of these figures are much lower than in 2023. Overall, DC doesn’t even rank among the worst 30 cities in the country for violent crime, and it’s safer than more than a few cities in deep red states.
- So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 1,600 violent crimes and nearly 16,000 total crimes reported in Washington, D.C.
- There have been nearly 100 homicides, including the fatal shootings of innocent civilians like three-year-old Honesty Cheadle and 21-year-old Capitol Hill intern Eric Tarpinion-Jachym.
You can pick any city in the world and find horrific specific crimes to exploit. Again, DC’s murder rate and violent crime rate are high, but they’re nowhere near the highest in the country, and both have significantly dropped since 2023.
- Vehicle theft in Washington, D.C. is more than three times the national average—ranking it among the most dangerous cities in the world.
Vehicle thefts surged across the country during the pandemic, not just in DC. That said, carjackings have been a uniquely difficult problem in the city. Washington, DC, led the country in carjackings after the pandemic.
But note that the White House doesn’t include 2024 in the 547 percent figure. That’s probably because carjackings dropped by 50 percent last year. And vehicle thefts dropped by 25 percent.
- Metro Police Department leadership are allegedly cooking the books to make crime statistics appear more favorable.
Outrageous!
We should probably pass a law to remove from office and prosecute any public official who buries unflattering statistics or “cooks the books” to make themselves or their office look better. I’d certainly support such a law.
We might start here:
More to the point, yes, police officials are known to juke crime stats to make themselves look better. This is not a good thing.
But you can’t fake a dead body. And homicide figures in DC reflect the overall drop in crime.
- Many residents don’t feel safe reporting crime.
The link here goes to a right-wing X account excerpting from a ridiculously-framed Washington Post article about how, despite a decline in crime, the city still “feels” dangerous. So this is about vibes, not statistics.
You know what really makes people reluctant to report crimes? Mass deportations and militant immigration enforcement, and fear or mistrust of the police in marginalized communities. You needn’t take my word for it. Ask law enforcement officials themselves.
Somehow, I doubt scenes like the one below will make the 46 percent of Black and 15 percent of Latino DC residents feel safer about interacting with law enforcement.
FBI, DEA and other law enforcement recorded in Georgetown walking around “There’s not much going on around here… maybe they’re practicing”
— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2025-08-13T04:35:37.475Z
Finally:
- More than half of all violent crime in the U.S. goes unreported in the first place.
- WUSA-TV: “D.C. residents voice frustration over rising violence, questioning police stats and demanding real action to make neighborhoods feel safe again.
I’m not sure what the first point has to do with DC. Yes, it’s mostly accurate to say about half of crimes go unreported. This has always been the case, and it’s true from year to year. It’s why you should look at trends, not specific numbers. It’s also why we should compare FBI crime data, which comes from crimes reported to police, to National Crime Victimization Survey data, which comes from phone surveys.
This doesn’t mean crime isn’t really down in DC. What they’re trying to do here is make you distrust all crime data, and rely instead on what they tell you to think.
So subways are dangerous, terrifying places. (They’re about the safest public space you can find.) New York City is a cesspool of violence and debauchery. (It’s one of the safest big cities in the country.) Blue jurisdictions are violent, anarchic hellholes. (After accounting for density, they’re safer than red jurisdictions.)
As for the WUSA report linked in the White House document, it’s true that people don’t like living with crime. And they don’t like feeling like their government is unresponsive when they feel unsafe. It’s also true that people tend to feel unsafe when they see disorder—homelessness, people visibly struggling with mental illness, people doing drugs in public, litter, and blight.
Deploying the military won’t make people safer—and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.
None of this is to diminish the crime that does occur in DC. The city still has one of the higher crime rates in the country. But this has always been the case. And there are lots of possible explanations for it, most of which are too complicated and nuanced to get into here. But here’s what we can say for certain: DC’s crime rate has not spun “out of control.” DC’s crime rate is not the fault of permissive, progressive crime policy. Nor is it the fault of the current city leadership. Crime in DC is actually falling. A surge of heavily armed troops is not going to fix any of DC’s problems— and it certainly won’t make residents more trustful of law enforcement.
I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in DC. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.