I live in Washington, DC and I can assure you that our mayor, Muriel Bowser, can be usefully compared to water, in that she always follows the path of least resistance. See, Mayor Bowser would like to do more about DC’s falling yet still sky-high murder rate (down from 274 murders in 2023 to 187 in 2024, but still fourth-highest in the nation among big cities, after Memphis, St. Louis, and Baltimore, and 800% higher than New York City), but, well, there are a lot of, you know, sleeping dogs in the way, and we all hate to wake up a sleeping dog—they look so peaceful—and if I can get elected without waking any of them, well, why bother!
And so it goes, and so it went, until President Trump saw a big, fat, beautiful issue sitting right under his nose, and after an important white guy got beat up by a bunch of black kids, he reacted. And, despite all the nonsense that Trump predictably trumpeted regarding DC crime, the influx of federal law enforcement into DC has lowered the crime rate measurably, as the New York Times tells us in some detail.
The simple fact is, the crime rate in DC and many other major American cities—most of them long under Democratic control—is far higher than it “needs” to be. In 2012 there were only 88 murders in DC. There is simply no “good” reason for the massive increase, other than massive indifference on the part of the city government, and, sad to say, the city’s population. The prosperous areas are safe but expensive, while in the poorer sections it seems that the voters have no real faith that anything will ever change.
Bowser should have seen this coming, particularly in allowing the slow proliferation of “squatting” tents in various parts of the city. She should have known that Trump would use the special powers given to the president over the District, but, well, it was the sleeping dogs again. Why go looking for trouble? And so we get 12-ton Oshkosh M-ATVs, like the one pictured above, parked in front of Union Station, not to “fight crime”, but to show all the tourists that Donald Trump is kicking ass and taking names.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, at least, has had the smarts to take preemptive action against Trump’s itchy trigger finger, sending state highway troopers into major California cities, to do, effectively, what Trump is doing in DC—enforcing existing laws aggressively rather than passively. One can congratulate Newsom on his belated recognition that there are crimes other than those of “Big Oil” that deserve his attention.
Politico reports that Trump is readying, as one might expect, a “major” new crime bill, though no one seems to know what would be in it. Civil libertarians, like me, are correctly terrified of the Trumpification of law enforcement in the U.S.—as the indispensable Radly Balko explains at the Unpopulist—but the continuing failure of Democratic big city mayors to do anything substantial about crime has given Trump an opportunity big enough to, yes, drive a Oshkosh M-ATV through.
My grudging praise of Trump’s acumen in seizing the crime issue most emphatically does not extend to his obscene mistreatment of “illegal aliens” and the use of masked thugs who violate every last shred of due process to harass, bully, and condemn human beings innocent of any but the most trivial infractions of the law. This is not law enforcement. This is fascism.
