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Comment by sugarpimpdorsey | Hacker News Reader

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DC'a murder _rate_ is 19th in the country per Wikipedia, and 1/4 of #1 St. Louis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

The pace of muders in DC this year should put it somewhere around the mid 1960's numbers of around 150: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm

So... there are the raw numbers. Want to adjust your position on that "disinfo campaign?"

Here's a list of cities with per capita homicide rates: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_r...

I agree that it would be misleading to judge D.C. based on being at a 30 year low. Of the cities with the highest homicide rates, only Philadelphia has a higher population and rate. It's fair to say that there are other cities close in population. But it's clear that D.C. has a abnormally high homicide rate when compared to all of the other U.S. cities of its size or larger. Even if you only compared it to all other U.S. cities within, say, 100k of population, it's still at a very high percentile.

You are right it's misleading to say DC is at a 30 year low- the data I posted shows that it is actually at a 60 year low.

It's not clear at all that it has an abnormally high homicide rate at all. DC is not even listed on the link you provided- the one I provided has cities of equivalent size.

You can find it in the list under the heading 'Other statistics".

Just to be consistent with my sibling comment: it is improper to conclude that St. Louis is the most murdery place in America. The city of St. Louis metro population is 3 million people, who travel to the city proper to murder each other even though only 280k people live in those political boundaries.

I like how down in the comments you attack absolute numbers despite using absolute numbers in this post, but fail to note per capita numbers because per capita numbers would make this argument fall apart. Good luck with your campaign to make it look reasonable for a federal takeover of crime enforcement as a prelude to shutting down demonstrations against this administration.

Just want to point out that the "coordinated disinfo campaign" is based on a federal press release: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-....

Well, that press release was issued Jan 3 2025 by the incumbent appointed by the Biden regime. Whichever way you want to argue it... it's political.

The wikipedia article about then-US Attorney for DC includes this note:

"Under Graves, the US Attorney's Office declined to prosecute 67% of those arrested for crimes in DC in 2022, including 72% of misdemeanor arrests and 53% of felony arrests."

Crime is always down if you don't prosecute crime. Murder stats are the best to consider since those a harder (but not impossible) to fudge.

>>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_M._Graves

> Whichever way you want to argue it... it's political.

Yes, political information is political. Very astute.

So you endorse using federal military resources to secure a city that is not the most dangerous place in the country and that is at generational lows for violent crime?

And you are okay with this in the context of a pedophile rapist felon traitorous president who is bent on vengeance, a famously thin skin and a primate's view of the use of power?

Dallas had 108 murders in 1H 2025. Where's their invasion force?

Dallas has 5.6x the land area and nearly double the population.

You can't lie with numbers that are easily provable.

Could you say a few words on the impact of land area to the discussion?

Once you concede on that, could you say what homicide level requires a police state as a reaction? It would appear to be within a factor of two of the present numbers, but I can't work out where the line would be.

> You can't lie with numbers that are easily provable.

Climate change would like a word with you.

Land area doesn’t matter

Population does matter somewhat but not really in this case. If you’re invading a city because crime is high it only makes sense to do if it’s high in absolute numbers; otherwise you’re not really having much impact.

Also half of DC actually lives in MD and VA.

Why does land area matter exactly?

It doesn't, at all. It's born from the same complaint that, say, NYC outvotes the rest of the state although it's only a tiny portion of the total size.

Because it permits such nonsensical statements such as "France has more murders per year than London" (therefore London is safer by comparison QED).

When you can draw arbitrary borders, you can make the numbers mean whatever you want.

Crime counts are normalized to crime rates with respect to population, not land area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

And you'll see that Washington D.C. doesn't make the top ten for rates of any of the major violent crimes (murder, rape, etc.) nor for the "Total" violent crime.

One of the biggest errors in the interpretation of crime statistics is improperly using the overnight resident population, instead of the better daytime population, as the denominator. This error is often committed in cases as various as St. Louis and Berkeley, as well as DC.

National crime levels are at 30 year lows. I think you're being rather disingenuous here. Media coverage on DC specifically seems entirely reasonable and the first report I looked at linked to the same stats you did.

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/dc-crime-trends-trump-national-g...

You can tell that journalism is dead because they cite how much it's allegedly dropped in the past year with literally zero other info or context. Ok, dropped from what to what? How does this compare to other cities? Has it gone up consistently for the last deacde? How much crime is still happening after that drop? Is the drop in real, predicted crime, or just reports of it? Are there reasons why reporting would go down despite crime not going down?

And to cite these numbers without providing context at the same time of citing them that someone was literally fired for allegedly manipulating the data. And to be clear they're just allegations, but also the data is controlled by someone whose job and ego is tied to these numbers dropping, and the rate of the drop is basically unbelievable - 25% to 28% drop in a single year? After suggesting it went down 34% the year before?

Even if my info I just wrote is something someone could dispute, is it not part of journalism to at least provide the bare minimum of context for people to at least know why this is controversial? If Trump's position on this is so soundly and clearly misguided, then it shouldn't be a problem at all to provide all facts and context to demonstrate as much. Instead we're given a single fact with zero other context.

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