Yes, D.C. Has a Crime Problem. It’s Different Than Trump Thinks.

President Donald Trump yesterday announced what amounts to a federal takeover of law enforcement in the District of Columbia. He declared that he would deploy the National Guard and invoke an obscure provision of the city’s charter to take control of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department. This was all, he said, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”

Is crime in D.C., as Trump put it last week, “totally out of control”? Critics were quick to dismiss his claims as fearmongering. They pointed to rapidly declining rates of violence over the past year. “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Mayor Muriel Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday.