Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-cri... - August 10th, 2025
Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-... - January 3rd, 2025 (My note: Published by this admin's DoJ in January of this year)
DC Metro Police 2025 Year-to-Date Crime Comparison - https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.
I beg to differ mostly. The criminal justice system is heavily staffed by people of all colors and ethnicities, including many, many blacks, who in some cities predominate among the police (and general population, at least in some neighborhoods). Despite this, it's often just as bad towards civilians and minority civilians as a mostly-white police force.
More specifically, the criminal justice system is classist, and that minorities are often part of the poor and underclass in many cities makes them much more targets than their coincidental skin color, though it sometimes seems to serve as a useful visual marker for police to who it's easier to target on sight. The idea of so many police officers and other law enforcement officials who are themselves black or some other visibly non-white ethnic group nonethless targeting civilians who are of the same color, for race reasons, doesn't really make sense from a racism perspective, but it does make sense from a class perspective.
Racism and classism feed each other. We've known that since even before the civil war. Claiming classism doesn't make racism - poof - disappear. It actually reinforces it.
Spreading the net a bit wider, you can also look at the recent and massive ICE crackdowns on illegal migrants (and sometimes US citizens along the way). Just by looking at photos of these incidents, you quickly note that many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc, enforcing draconian crackdowns against other visible minorities. That's not simply something you can label under racism and be done with defining it. Other systemic factors are at work there.
That's because there's two types of racism: individual, and systemic or institutional.
Individual racism is the low-brow obvious type of stuff. Slurs, clutching your handbag walking next to a black person, that type of thing.
Institutional or systemic racism is more abstract, but also much more harmful as a whole.
Take, for example, the DEA. Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug despite not being nearly as harmful as even most schedule 3 drugs. That's not a coincidence.
That reflects the widespread institutional racism of the DEA. Marijuana was chosen to be scheduled 1 because of its association with black Americans, deliberating inflicting more widespread harm onto them.
Okay, so why does this matter? Because within racist institutions, you yourself are forced to be racist. Even just existing in the institution is an act of racism, similarly to how working for a military contractor is itself an act of support of War.
These institutions have a culture and set of expectations and rules, and to exist within them you must comply.
For example, you cannot be a police officer and simply choose not to criminal marijuana and instead criminal white drugs like cocaine. You have rules, and you must follow them.
You being black does not override that. You being Asian doesn't override that.
So, the big picture. ICE, as an institution, is racist and has goals to particularly harm specific racial minorites. It mobilizes on these goals via its policy, it's expectations, and even it's culture.
Being a brown ICE worker does not detect from those goals, and just by existing in ICE and doing their bidding you are implicitly racist. Because the institution is racist, and you support it. And their goals are racist, and you're a big part of making their goals a reality.
As a side note, this is also why "I have a black friend" arguments don't work. That's a refutation of individual racism, not institutional racism.
For more examples of systemic racism throughout US history, please see: redlining, gerrymandering, Jim Crow, segregation, the FBI, and the CIA
Alternatively, we could just make DC a state, which I'm broadly in favor of.
Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
Yes I would, the people of DC should have representation, but using retrocession to get there would dilute any influence they have on their own politics and local control. I understand that the founders were worried about fairness and no state being favored over another by selecting one to be the capitol of the country, but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today – especially if that state were made up out of whole cloth from the people who had already lived there.
On the contrary, it is a significant concern for me and I'm sure I'm not alone in my thoughts.
Fully half of the top ten richest counties in this country are suburbs of DC, a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying. I find this to be an absolute travesty that shows just how much incentive and corrupting force there is in the federal government.
Return the land to the states. Keep a small federal territorial enclave for actual federal buildings and functions. Make a lot more of these territorial enclaves all around this vast country so that power is less concentrated in one place. That's one thing the Germans got right, in their federalism.
Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)
It's in Arlington because... lobbying! Bezos wanted to absorb more defense spending in AWS and chose to be physically nearby to rub shoulders and get deals.
> us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
I doubt us-east-1 employs more than a handful of people. Datacenters are primarily hands-off. Bethesda supposedly has ~650 employees across 6 continents.
But I think you're missing the point: am I to understand that having datacenters and game developers in the area leads it to having the highest median household income in this fantastically wealthy country? Not New York with Wall Street, or Los Angeles through whose port the two largest economies in the world trade, or San Francisco with its own world-class port and all of its software industry?
Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
> Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
IMO it's perfectly legitimate for organizations to advocate for their interests as long as they do not engage in bribery. They often have subject matter expertise the government does not, and more information allows for better decision-making. Would you rather the government operate in a vacuum, completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of the country? Btw, it's not just corporations that lobby, there are plenty of NGOs doing the same thing.
If you want to blame someone for this dynamic, blame the founders of this country, who decided to create a federal district rather than put the capital in an existing city with an existing industrial base.
If anything were to happen it should probably be the creation of a "middle" Virginia on some sort of Northeast southwest line so that the metropolitan area is split among three states to dilute it.
Failing that just split it among VA/MD, that'd basically leave the status quo unchanged with regard to interests and power but at least make less people's lives subject to political football.
Now, I'm not a student of politics, so I may be making some error, but I'd say (1) only about 2/3 of the ones on that list* are in a decent political position, and (2) that in any event a shifting of the balance of power between states (not just US states, any states) and their corresponding federal government is a big deal and not to be done lightly.
Of course, because I'm not a student of politics, I also don't take any strong position about what the USA should or shouldn't do with DC. If y'all turn DC into Trump's personal walled castle and themed gold-plated golf course, all I'm gonna do is get some popcorn, I won't stop you.
* including e.g. the one I live in, where the president has far less power than in the American system and real power is with the chancellor, and also the voting system is completely different and supports a plurality of parties not just two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
NL is kind of special: the capital of the country is Amsterdam, but the seat of government is the Hague. But in Belgium, which is about as divided as it comes, the seat of government is Brussels, which is itself bi-lingual.
I don't think this is a problem that requires a particularly convoluted solution. What it does require is for people to simply play by the rule of law. And that's the thing that the United States is currently putting to the test on every metric that matters.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
A good example of this is NYC around 2000. It worked.
Counterexample: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."
"“In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,” the researchers wrote. “The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.”"
"“Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of proactive policing can inspire additional crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police stops, summonses and so on,” the authors wrote."
NYC did indeed see a big crime drop in the 2000s… but so did everywhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...
The same way a surveillance camera in every room would also reduce bad behavior...
If they're not, nothing will happen.
Costa Rica’s 17 in 100k is ~2.5 times bigger than the US’ 6 in 100k people killed by homicide.
Thanks to gun crime, the US’ homicide rates are at least 7x the rest of the first world, anglophone, countries where rates are sub 1 in 100k.
By that measure it is 2-3x more confronting, to move from the United Kingdom to the States than it is from the US to Costa Rica.
Except it's not "thanks to gun crime." Some of the states with the lowest homicide rates, like Idaho and Utah, have the most guns.
This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
You certainly have things like rural gangs, too, but if things are spread out you just don't have that critical mass to ramp the numbers up. This also plays out in other types of crimes – cars get stolen anywhere there are cars, but thieves are playing the odds and it's easier not to attract in a dense population while they'd stick out if they started going up some stranger's driveway in a place where there's no other traffic. When that Kia lock exploit was in the news, there were bored teenagers basically treating street parking as a shopping mall because the supply was huge and until they actually touched a car there was no crime in walking down a sidewalk.
The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.
Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
Crime rates are reported per 100,000 people, so population isn’t the reason.
While crime rates are per 100,000 people, population density makes a big difference because a low density, homogeneous population is going to have fewer interactions which turn negative. That's why people comparing crime stats usually compare cities or regions to avoid falsely reporting a correlation which is nothing more than a function of urban vs. rural density.
Retirement is a long way away. But next year, we have an Airbnb in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose that is safe. It’s a high rise condo 2/2 with a gym and a pool.
The murder rate in “Atlanta” is also still around 20 per 100,000 and I lived in various suburbs of metro Atlanta until 2022 and was never in fear of my life going into the city. But I also lived in a suburban enclaves there.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be one of these ignorant entitled Americans who refuse to learn Spanish. I am close to A2 level Spanish now and should be there by the time we go next year. I can hold simple conversations.
Why is grass height any of the government's business? Who voted for the people who did that? Who came up with the legal theories under which those laws exist? Why were these ever a justifiable pretense for the government to threaten people with force in the first place?
We all know the argument. It's some mumbo jumbo about mice and pests and public health, about blight and property values, and government interest in those things. But now the people (demographically, if not literally the same individuals in some cases) who were the ones peddling it are the ones threatened by it and it's made immediately clear to them how bullshit their justification was.
I feel like I'm the fucking goose chasing the guy in the down coat and I don't want to be.
Anything eventually involves the military shooting nukes at you.
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.
"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."
If you look at the actual list of homicides in a major American city, the victims are often people who are involved in the drug trade. Homicides are often highly concentrated in small areas. A large portion of the city sees no homicides at all in a given year. I don't know if an equivalent map exists for DC, but you can look at a map of homicides in Boston in 2024. There are a few areas where there are clusters with 2-3 homicides within a few blocks. Then there are whole neighborhoods where there are no homicides at all, or just one or two. https://www.universalhub.com/crime/murder/2024
Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
For decades now, the media has painted a sensationalized picture of big cities. I was traveling once and was talking to an older couple from a rural area. When I told them where I lived, they were genuinely concerned for my safety. I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.
> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?
[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.
I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.
And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.
The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.
What is out of touch is declaring that the crime problem, which is actually improving, is an emergency that justifies deploying troops to the streets of the capital. These troops are being deployed to the areas around the national mall where they are highly visible - but there is very little violent crime and a lot of existing police presence around the monuments. They aren't trained or experienced in street-level law enforcement. Neither are the FBI agents, who are being taken away from other critical priorities like counterintelligence to patrol the national mall. Note that Trump did not deploy the national guard on January 6th, when there was a genuine threat on the national mall. This is not a genuine effort to address crime. It is an extremely cynical effort to look like they are addressing crime while they grab more and more unchecked executive power.
Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.
Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.
[1] Here, I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C.
The GP elsewhere in the thread pointed out that in like-to-like comparisons of Washington, DC against peer world cities, it fares really poorly in violent crime.
> Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce
I doubt that the people who are committing crimes were disrupted from the workforce.
> DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's
Both things can be true: DC used to be worse in violent crime, and today's violent crime is still unacceptably high.
In particular for DC, note also that Republicans have blocked for many years efforts by DC's government to restrict the supply of guns and the lack of a national strategy means that someone who can't buy a gun in DC goes a few miles away to Virginia. In most other countries, you don't have the option of even a short walk offering access to very different laws. This also shows up in the crime stats: in my neighborhood there've been a couple of fatal shootings over the last decade – and in every case both the perp and victim were people from Maryland who came over the border to do a drug deal because they can switch jurisdictions in 5 minutes and thus confuse a police response.
Funnily enough, academic work suggests the exact opposite, that the homicide rate in this country could be 5x higher were it not for advancements in trauma care[0]. Inner-city hospitals are applying battlefield medicine techniques and saving lives, turning homicides into aggravated assaults.
> we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people
The state of West Virginia, which has more guns and a higher share of unhappy, economically marginalized young people than Virginia, has a lower homicide rate than its eastern neighbor.
Ultimately, we likely disagree on "the root cause of crime", as it were. I don't believe that more aid for the poor or reducing income inequality will materially reduce violent crime rates, because by and large people do not commit violent crime in order to escape poverty. Instead, people are poor for a lot of the same reasons that they commit crime: they have poor impulse control, high time preference, and little consideration for those around them. We have not yet figured out a way to apply money to people in such a way to change these undesirable behavioral patterns, so I am against spending more of the taxpayer's money in this fruitless endeavor. The ways that do work have fallen out of favor in society.
I believe what will make a material impact is lengthier sentences and more pretrial detention; that is, policy must favor the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of repeat criminals.
I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.
Objectively speaking, DC’s 27 homicides per 100k people in 2024 is almost double what it was in 2012. If actually started going back up before the pandemic. And in absolute terms, DC has about 8 times the homicide rate of a relatively safe american city like new york or san diego.
> If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk
It’s ultimately driven by gangs, but most people killed aren’t gang members per se. They’re gang adjacent, or siblings or friends who get caught up in the gang wars. Also, the gangs aggressively recruit young men in the neighborhoods where they operate. It’s very “you’re with us or against us.”
> go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches.
I’ve lived in downtown Baltimore, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. I know how cities work. But the violence is a constant for the people who live there. We got to know an Indian family who had a great Indian restaurant in the ghetto in Wilmington, which has a similar homicide rate to DC. Yeah, on any given day you won’t see someone get murdered. But they had someone get killed on the street outside their restaurant. And EMTs wouldn’t come for hours because they were worried about getting caught in a gang firefight. Then another person got shot in the street near my wife’s office at 5 am waiting for the Nike Store to open. That was just in one year. Imagine growing up there and not being rich each to isolate yourself from the violence.
It’s the opposite: there are a handful of small hotspots which are less safe, but even those aren’t that bad. I live in a fairly mixed neighborhood (none of my immediate neighbors are white, 20% of the ward earn less than $50k, etc.) and it’s just not something people are worried about in daily life.
There is a hotspot about ¾ mile away where we had a couple of gang members kill each other. That’s not great, of course, but it’s literally one building and behind closed doors (the police arrested the perps from Maryland last year, and it’s been quiet since). Nobody else in the neighborhood is changing their plans, local businesses aren’t affected, etc. If you go by in the evening, it’s people walking dogs and kids playing, not hiding inside with the doors locked.
Again, there are real problems and I wholly support the continued programs to solve them, but the imagery being used to claim an emergency is a work of fiction. If they wanted to do something about crime, they’d start taking cars away from unsafe drivers as that’s far more likely to be harmful to most residents here.
Every action taken by a police organization is per se a political action. That's why "police" are called that.
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
Unless you have personal political clout, this is True for any nation.
I also had bad luck when traveling to the US. Got detained by the CBP - I think because I accidentally sneezed on the officer and pissed him off. (Either that or I looked like some terrorist). Had to stay in a cell for more than a day. I wasn't even questioned!
Thankfully, nothing happened after that. Was good to catch up on sleep though, since there was nothing to do.
These are not good times for those who believe in liberal values. Waiting over a decade for the pendulum to swing back.
Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.
Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown. ^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
> Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1]
[1] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
I think we ought to walk backwards from your question a bit. Is the position that the police are corrupt and abusive something that I'm supposed to disagree with? Is it supposed to be something obviously untrue (hint: it's not)?
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets.
However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does.
If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime?
Or will they continue to deny the tipping point?
At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets?
No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.
And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?
I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.
The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.
You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
And I remember that that was about focusing police on policing and spending more on having specialists provide social support and the kind of things that prevent crime, which cops aren't trained to do or any good at.
More than one.
>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?
More than once.
>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?
Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.
So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
All that stuff was 30-50 years ago. As I mentioned (and linked[0] to statistics), I'm old and things have changed a lot.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879420
Edit: Actually it was 35-50 years ago, but who's counting?
And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?
There was nothing clearly stating any dates or years.
Just like you did, I assumed what you said all happened in the past three weeks.
Especially since I said[0]:
"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge."
Because we grow up fast here in NYC. A month ago I was a child. Now I'm pushing 60. All in the past three weeks!
#Especially since I said[0]:
#"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several #attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the #Brooklyn Bridge."
That was for the robbery and before that you said:
#>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many #gun barrels have you stared down?
#More than one.
#>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just #standing there?
#More than once.
Nothing specific there. Why are you so antagonizing about it and trying to straw man something with my comment that doesn't exist? I only told you how I read (I'm probably not the only one) your comment and pointed out some context was missing and when you explained it, I accepted it.
Besides that, not believing someone is not an argument. On these issues, it means that you lack realistic perspective and have nothing to say.
Aside from what it makes you to discount someone's very real trauma, as your only patter.
As someone like you who has also been the victim of violent crime, I definitely do not want the military patroling any city. I hate violent crime, but that is not the way to solve it, period. It takes community policing and the slow process of raising people out of poverty, desperation and hopelessness, by undoing the damage that has been done to them through decades of economic oppression.
The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.
And this seems to be the incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_murders
Would you like to read that carefully?
https://mynorthwest.com/local/peaceful-protests-planned-in-s...
https://projects.seattletimes.com/2020/local/protest-timelin...
https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/09/24/police-arrest-13-d... https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/07/26/officer-injuries-p...
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/07/28/44178586/so-what...
Can you help me out?
mrangle also later said [0] they live “in a major city between Boston and DC”. So they aren’t describing Seattle. (Or actually any city in the US based on what they have shared so far)
Should I not believe that people's post's here defending cities are from legitimate experience (at least as stated, in their bubbles)?
What happened to the "believe" people ethic?
I don't live in Oakland. What do you want me to read carefully, super-sleuth? To what purpose? In spite of your masterful rhetorical question, you're wrong about the event in question and location.
Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
You can't be good with nine months of nationwide riots and then ever think that you understand the impact or can get a handle on everything that occurred via zero-start google searches.
You are describing an unnamed war-torn hellscape that matches no city in America. It’s like something out of a fictional writing class.
Which of those two types of comments are something you would believe?
>Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
We are _trying_ to consider them. But we are unable to make the leap from reality to the fantasy world you’ve been describing, so it’s really hard.
>Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
I guess it is a pretty good thing we live in a modern world with an internet that lets anybody that wants to share actual evidence. Unfortunately it also allows people to post they made up accounts they use in a conservative fireside story telling event, but those are identifiable by including outlandish details that would be easily verifiable, but also refusing to provide evidence, like names of cities.
Not really. Maybe you just have really punchable face? Given the diarrhea you're spewing, those traits combined would probably make most people want to beat the crap out of you.
Which would explain quite a bit. Hey. Let's be careful out there![0]
All of these around 2021-2022-2023. We moved out of Seattle in 2023. Maybe these snecdotes are not a big deal for you. For me they are scary.
Where is this "broad support" coming from? The actual people living in Washington DC, or rural outsiders who have conjured up some picture in their minds of "crime infested cities?" If you did a poll of everyone in DC, would the majority be in favor of increased policing?
It always seems like the people who are most vocal about crime in big cities are always the people who don't live in or visit those big cities.
I live in NYC[0] and I'm old. It's never been safer in the many decades I've been alive.
And the police have little to do with that. They're just the biggest and best-armed gang.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City[1]
[1] In fact, NYC saw fewer murders in 2024 than any year since 1958 -- long before my parents ever met.
You questioning my experience and where I live isn't an argument.
In liberal circles, we "believe" people. Remember? Especially those with bad experiences.
You questioning me just means that you can't tolerate people with differing experiences having opinions and perspectives that are counter to your own.
What I said is factual.
You're a sheltered person with a false entitlement to an opinion on this specific matter.
I live in a major city between Boston and DC. I've implied enough of my experience to warrant telling you to shove your rude scare quotes up your a*.
I've also lived in NYC. I have family that still lives in NYC. Who was just punched in the face for the second time in a couple of years, walking home at night. And that's in "safe" lower Manhattan.
What does where you live have to do where I live?
Just like the "person who walks with cameras", the only thing that you are communicating is that you are privileged and awful on a couple of levels. One of which is having zero perspective and real experience living in an urban area that is outside of wealthier zones and, especially in poorer cities, is only barely managed by police. Bourgeoise bubble living does not entitle you to having a policy opinion on how the poorer areas of cities should be managed, what it's like living in them let alone growing up in them, and on how they are doing on the street level. "Relativity" aside.
If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.
Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.
National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).
The DC is different and has a law that allows the federal government to do this. It’s unusual but not illegal and is a feature not a hack. corollary to a governar using both local police + NG
March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.
1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?
2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?
3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)
4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?
Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.
(Incidentally, I personally support the UN Resolution 181 for a 2-state solution, so I am against the position of the US government - whether Republicans or Democrats)
By my reckoning next stop would be an “accidental fire” in the House of Representatives.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-trumps-dc-deployment-...
ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.
>then they left without incident
They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.
But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)
1. "both a test and a warning sign"
2. Evidence Trump has no intention of turning the country into a military dictatorship.
You choose the more exptreme interpretation (#1) instead of the obvious one (#2)?
When the military was deployed then peacefully left, you still viewed that as an increase in the risk of a military takeover?
Even though the troops were withdrawn?
I’m just trying to understanding this upside down world where when something doesn’t happen it’s proof it’s more likely to happen in the future.
The Marine entered AND LEFT Los Angelas. Russia never did that.
If you had said “while the Marines were deployed the risk is higher” it’s at least logical.
But the fact they left without incident yet you think it’s proof of the opposite outcome is hard to understand.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess?
https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-...
St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k.
St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues.
https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-l...
Pretty sure that doesn't apply in LA in 2025.
https://apnews.com/article/national-guard-los-angeles-immigr...
It's now winding its way through the appeals process.
Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
St. Louis situation is absolutely abysmal. 20 is way too high, 69 is way too high. These are 3rd world numbers that are absolutely inexcusable. And we're only talking about murders here, if you look into other violent crime data, it's also substantial for D.C.
The FBI frequently gets involved in murder cases all over the country, there are field offices everywhere. States are significantly different things than the special federal District of Columbia. There, it is generally up to the Governor to deploy the national guard, although plenty of exceptions and precedents exist for the President to do so.
Widespread poverty and guns.
The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
That’s a bridge too far for me.
Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1].
Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-do...
You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
Maybe I missed something.
We can reasonably anticipate these programs will be shuttered for at least another year, if not another decade (or permanently). We can argue here or there about the exact numbers, but it's a waste of everyone's time so I just provided a generous range instead.
At the end of the day... what exactly do you think the billions of dollars of food and drugs sent to unfathomably poor areas were doing if not keeping a huge number of people alive?
I may have said in another comment, that I was actually against most of these cuts. Those programs (like PEPFAR). I actually worked with USAID 20 years ago teaching programming classes in Romania and Serbia, and not once did anyone I encountered have a single cynical view on anything. We were all just working hard to "teach a man to fish". So I know that these types of programs play a huge part in showing the world that we actually walk the walk in wanting a better world.
I still can't get behind the idea of wishing violence for policy changes. Maybe that's a core principle of mine. It feels anti-American, since we (historically) try to rise above that, even if we often fail.
The nature of policy changes at such high levels is that many decisions are going to result in people dying (think of geopolitical decisions, think of Syria, the famine in Sudan right now, etc).
And while this administration has definitely been more damaging than the past administrations, my reaction is to argue till our faces are blue whether it was a bad policy decision or not, rather than wish violence.
As a self-aware reductio ad absurdum, you ought to agree that violence in response to a policy of rounding up a certain ethnic group and murdering them en masse would be justified or at least in the realm of "not regrettable?"
And yes, I agree that many policy decisions can result in people dying. The moral valence of each one depends on the costs and benefits and the efforts undertaken to minimize the former and maximize the latter. And the intent is a factor too. Killing someone after a period of community deliberation for killing a child is a very different moral event than killing someone for fun.
In this particular instance, the cost/benefit analysis comes out to many people's calculation outrageously weighted to the cost side, and it is demonstrably the case that zero effort was put into minimizing those costs. This was also all knowable from Big Balls' position given that he knows how to use the Internet and could gain access to any expert in the world to more fully understand what he was doing. So he holds a lot of moral culpability (which does not imply carjacking him is a good way to deal justice, to be clear).
I will take my own advice on “intent matters” - and there’s been little care intent wise shown to actually study the impacts of these cuts. Which does make them feel more malicious.
All I did was give a short reply and a link to a news source.
Maybe you should talk to someone about your persecution fetish?
It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.
Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.
Article including the photo I'm describing: https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
> Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion.
The story is that he pushed her into the car first then faced the carjackers.
No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.
https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...
In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...
What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!
D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).
This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....
D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.
Philadelphia and Baltimore have a median income half that of DC. They’re among the poorest large cities in the country, while DC is one of the richest.
DC’s problem is that it’s run by people that are somehow dumber than Congress. A literal crackhead was mayor in the 1990s. I think Mayor Bowser is actually doing an excellent job,[1] but she’s the first good mayor the city has had in my lifetime, and everyone around her sucks.
[1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much. She’s not a Resistance type, and always says something like “well I don’t agree but we’ll do our best.” https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5446868-dc-crime-tr... (“I’m going to work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster. Let me put it that way.”).
> [1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much.
I don't think you intended it but this reads as an admission that you primarily approve of her due to her seeming opinion of Dear Leader.
Sadly, some of the malignant people around him are more cunning.