DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!
For a large swath of the USA homelessness is a real possibility and whether or not they will end up in that situation is mostly a game of chance.
If you really do not like the liberal policies that cities tend to have then maybe you should vote with your feet and move to a rural area or to a city that is run by the Republicans? Then you can be with the people who see things your way.
Oh, wait...
Your complaint isn’t really about “dismantling democracy,” but instead about Trump running roughshod over all the Democrats who run DC even when the people elect a Republican President, such as the anti-democratic permanent civil service. DC is the people’s city. It is constitutionally a federal enclave, and under the DC Home Rule Act the President has the right to federalize the police. Trump did so to carry out the policies people voted for.
I’m not a democrat. Help me steel-man your point.
1) Americans deserve a capital city that's at least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego, which have homicide rates one-third or one-quarter as high as D.C. over the last decade--even excluding the COVID-era spike in homicides.
2) The orderliness of a city is primarily an issue of policing and incarceration. You don't need to pass national gun control, or address "root causes"--just take gang members off the streets and put them in prison.
3) The problem isn't unique to D.C., but D.C. is an outlier because (a) the aesthetics of D.C. are important because it's the nation's capital; and (b) Trump has express statutory authority to federalize the D.C. police force under the DC Home Rule Act. DC thus can serve as a testbed for Republican policing in a major city, most of which won't elect Republican mayors.
Perhaps we have a different definition of “appropriate.”
Neither of those cities are very safe and orderly. Didn’t 3 people just get killed in Austin yesterday? DC is also tiny compared to the outlying cities that surround it. Baltimore anyone?
This is probably just more distraction to get the news stories away from those Epstein files.
Pre-covid, Austin’s homicide rate was around 4 per 100k. San Diego’s is typically under 4x DC’s never got below 14 per 100k (in 2012) and spiked up to 40 per 100k in 2023.
DC is 20% more populous than Baltimore. The nearest city larger than DC is Philly, 140 miles away.
There are 6.3 million in the greater DC area, DC is a small part of what goes on in that region.
As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.
I'm sure they exist somewhere -- but downtown DC is definitely not "covered" with homeless encampments.
The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.
[1] This is obviously true, because every city has poor people, but not every city allows homeless people and serial criminals to intrude on the public sphere. Tokyo has many, many people who are quite poor by the material standards of DC. Tokyo isn’t clean and orderly because it somehow got rid of all the poor people.
Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.
I salute your honesty about what it is you think (and I agree!) this is actually about.
Obviously deploying literal military force against the homeless is batshit crazy. But that is where we are.
If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…
> Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.
Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?
Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.
I was just there for a week, mainly in the downtown area, and honestly don't recall seeing a single homeless person.
You've really been stockholm-syndromed by this godforsaken country and Western culture's persistent aversion to enforcing the law against anyone perceived as less fortunate. This wouldn't be acceptable in peer Eastern countries' capitals like Singapore, Tokyo, or Beijing