Although crime is declining, Washington is still far more dangerous than the capital of the United States should be. Let’s not define deviancy down.
President Donald Trump yesterday announced what amounts to a federal takeover of law enforcement in the District of Columbia. He declared that he would deploy the National Guard and invoke an obscure provision of the city’s charter to take control of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department. This was all, he said, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”
Is crime in D.C., as Trump put it last week, “totally out of control”? Critics were quick to dismiss his claims as fearmongering. They pointed to rapidly declining rates of violence over the past year. “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Mayor Muriel Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday.
The reality is more complicated than either the president or the mayor depict. Bowser is right that violence has declined. But the nation’s capital really does have a long-standing and profound violence problem that will not improve without deliberate intervention.
Like most other big cities, D.C. experienced a surge in violence during the pandemic. A timely analysis from the crime researcher Jeff Asher shows that murder crested in December 2023 and has been declining steadily since; the 2025 total through last month equals the equivalent figure in 2019. Carjackings are also down; Asher reports that July saw the fewest monthly carjackings since May 2020.
Look beyond the recent past, and the trend lines are less sunny. Although violent-crime rates overall are near 30-year lows, Washington’s murder rate was generally rising even before the pandemic. The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020. Lastly, Asher highlights some discrepancies between the city’s official violent-crime statistics and what it reports to the FBI, with the latter showing a more gradual decline in overall violence.
Notably, both sets of statistics seem out of keeping with the views of D.C. residents. About 65 percent of them told The that crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem last year, even as violence declined.
Perhaps locals are responding to a measurable increase in public disorder—petty offenses such as vagrancy, shoplifting, and unsanitary conditions, which drive our perceptions of major crime.
