Trump’s Washington, DC, crime crackdown exposes perception gap

President Donald Trump referred to as Washington, D.C., a metropolis overrun by “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” as he moved to federalize town’s police power and deploy a whole lot of National Guard members.

His dire depiction of the nation’s capital is at odds, nonetheless, with federal knowledge exhibiting that violent crime within the District has dropped to its lowest stage in three many years.

“We are not experiencing a spike in crime,” Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser stated Sunday on MSNBC.

“In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down,” Bowser stated.

Washington skilled a spike in crime in 2023, with the best variety of homicides reported within the District for the reason that Nineties and a surge within the variety of reported carjackings.

But that pattern has reversed since then, in accordance with data from the Justice Department.

As Trump’s unprecedented use of presidential authority to activate the National Guard has reverberated by means of town, Bowser referred to as his characterizations of D.C. “hyperbolic” and “unsettling.”

But there’s a perception amongst some residents that crime continues to be rising within the nation’s capital, regardless of the information.

A Washington Post poll last year discovered {that a} majority of Washingtonians, 65%, stated that crime in D.C. is an “extremely serious” or a “very serious problem.”

Those charges have been increased than ballot outcomes for 2023, regardless of the drop in crime recorded in 2024.

Nationally, a YouGov poll carried out final month discovered that 34% of U.S. adults stated that homicide charges in U.S. cities have “increased a lot” since 1990.

That perception is at odds with knowledge exhibiting that murders have fallen in most cities over the past a number of many years.

Bowser advised that the gap between perception and actuality is a operate of how crime makes folks really feel.

“It doesn’t matter if crime has gone down if you were a victim,” Bowser stated at a press convention after Trump’s announcement.

Jeff Asher, a crime knowledge analyst and co-founder of knowledge analytics agency AH Datalytics, instructed CNBC that Americans broadly “always think crime is rising,” even when the information reveals in any other case.

There is a stark partisan divide over perceptions of crime, and Trump has lengthy made claims of excessive crime in American cities to justify his tough-on-crime playbook.

His rhetoric — portray racially numerous, Democratic-led cities as crime-ridden — additionally faucets into longstanding efforts to mobilize voters in suburban areas.

A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters — 68% — stated that lowering crime must be a prime coverage precedence for the president and Congress in 2024, in comparison with 47% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, according to the Pew Research Center.

Asher instructed CNBC that policymakers shouldn’t “base their crime-reduction strategies and policy and programs on the perception issue.”

He stated that coverage choices must be based mostly on knowledge, however to make “people feel safe, we have to address the perception issue.”

“I think that they’re two very different sides of a similar coin,” he continued.

Asher stated that at the same time as crime charges within the District decline — undercutting Trump’s arguments — “at the same time, you can make a very valid argument that things are too high, that we should be trying to see fewer murders and the D.C. murder rate relative to other large cities remains elevated.”

“There’s no reason to feel comfortable with these declines, necessarily, as permanent successes, given how far the city still has to go, and that’s true of a lot of American cities,” he stated.