Of course DC has crime

The questions raised by Trump's emergency are different.

Here’s a note from a resident of Washington, DC: Of course the city has crime. The murder rate is higher than many other places. Smaller but still disturbing crimes have been committed in my neighborhood and on my Metro line in the last few years.

It’s also true that crime has declined in the last couple of years. My anecdotal sense of this matches the statistics. But people still don’t like crime. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s pragmatic response to President Trump’s emergency declaration is in line with that view: She has tried to cooperate with the feds, even as they intrude on her power over the police.

The truth is, local authorities themselves had already abandoned some of their more lenient policing protocols. To give one small example: In the early years of this decade, they stopped arresting or prosecuting Metro farebeaters, on the theory that only the poorest people would ever commit such a tiny crime, and arresting them would further penalize them for being poor.

At some point, however, it became obvious that all sorts of people were blatantly hopping turnstiles, which was really off-putting because they would do it right in front of the people who paid. Eventually, police not only resumed the arrests, but the Metro system put up new gates that were much harder to jump.

So there is crime, and local politicos know they need to address it. But that’s not really the question raised by President Trump’s decision to seize formal control of the DC police and send in federal agents to help them.

No, the questions are different. Here are some:

Are federal agents and troops trained to help much?

Is this a strategy or a symbolic exercise?

What does it cost us as taxpayers, compared with the return?

How much more does it cost, knowing that every cent is borrowed at interest for our kids to pay back?

Is it an emergency?

Is it sufficient that one person claims it is an emergency?

If we think one person’s claim is sufficient, which emergency are we prepared to accept next?

Trump has already said that if Congress does not extend his 30-day emergency powers under a law applying to DC, he may discover a national emergency.

Where do we think the next president might discover an emergency?

Does this exercise… distract from something?

Trump’s declaration, and all the rhetoric that accompanied it, lean into prejudice. People who do not live in big cities are conditioned to be afraid of them. I learned this as someone who did not grow up in a big city. The declaration plays on that fear, and widens the gulf between Americans.

Statistics are different from place to place. But unfortunately, crime is everywhere and anywhere; you are more likely to have a drug problem in your own family or on your own block than you are to encounter trouble in somebody else’s city.