What Trump doesn’t (but should) understand about crime in Washington, D.C.
To hear Donald Trump tell it, addressing crime in Washington, D.C., is a riddle he’s solved. In fact, the president spent several minutes at an unrelated White House event Monday afternoon boasting that the combination of deportations and National Guard deployments has led to a “renaissance” in the nation’s capital.
“We have very little crime now,” he claimed. “This was the crime capital, frankly, of the world. It was the most unsafe capital of any country in the world. Now it’s one of the safest, and it’s one of the safest places in the United States.”
Trump went on and on about the crime-free paradise he’s created and the many calls he’s received from unnamed people thanking him for the magical results. “Everyone’s safe now,” the president said. “Nobody’s getting mugged, shot.”
After describing a city filled with residents who suddenly want to walk to work and struggle to get restaurant reservations because so many people are out and about, the Republican concluded, “It was a graffiti-filled, crime-filled mess. We turned it into Shangri-La.”
It was an interesting choice of metaphors, since Shangri-La is a place that only exists in fiction.
The president has spent nearly a full year patting himself on the back, claiming credit for having eliminated crime in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, facts keep getting in the way.
Indeed, shortly after Trump claimed that “nobody” in the nation’s capital is the victim of violent crime anymore, The New York Times reported, “In reality, four homicides were reported in the last week, and 16 in the last month, according to police statistics, up from the same periods last year.”
Those statistics come just two months after NPR reported on the latest analysis of crime data from the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, which found that Trump’s policy “has reduced petty property crimes, but has had little to no effect on violent crime, despite the high cost to taxpayers.”
Recommended
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
Latest Post
