“”What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writesReason‘s Robby Soave, who lives there. “One is semi-professional gang crime, mostly confined to sketchy neighborhoods, that usually targets other gang members. This is the kind of crime every large city has, and is counteracted by spending more money on homicide detectives and then aggressively prosecuting illegal firearms violators.”
“Then there’s mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people setting up tent cities,” he continues, noting that the most egregiously large and disorderly encampments were cleaned up. “Lastly, there are large groups of teenagers rampaging through otherwise fairly nice and affluent areas, assaulting people and stealing cars, and also getting into fights with each other. Seems to be driven by a mix of post-pandemic societal collapse, trends in youth behavior, and insufficient action by authorities. It’s here where a more robust police presence might do the most good.” It’s this third group that news reports are mostly fixating on, the group responsible for the Big Balls assault and that has caught Trump’s attention.”
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Crime is down, and, “though the decrease is laudable, this is in part because crime and disorder were rampant during the pandemic. It has taken years for it to come down to seminormal rates, and those “normal rates” aren’t even that good: “The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020.” But lots of crime data is unfortunately easy to manipulate, and novel approaches by new entrants—young people engaged in serious property crime and assaults in previously safe areas—are surely worth stamping out as they emerge.
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a ton of D.C.’s criminal justice system is already under the federal government’s control, and the feds are doing a rather poor job managing it. “That starts with the US attorney’s office, which, unlike a normal federal prosecutor’s office, also does the job of a district attorney and prosecutes local crimes. More significantly, the basic local trial court—the DC Superior Court—is technically a federal court whose members need to be confirmed by the Senate. Senate majority leaders, understandably, are normally not that fired up about local trial courts in DC, and they don’t like to spend floor time on these confirmations.” A high vacancy rate (roughly 20 percent) is the result, which means people in need of punishment don’t receive it so swiftly.
The federal government also handles pretrial supervision for people who’ve been arrested and are awaiting full court proceedings, adds Yglesias, but the agencies handling this can’t seem to figure out how to do their damn jobs: The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, in 2023, “had 2,120 offenders on ‘maximum supervision level’ but only 490 outfitted with GPS monitors,” for example, per Politico. And when a pretrial release of a man accused of shooting 26 rounds from an AR-15 at a car made the rounds on the news, the Pretrial Services Agency came under intense scrutiny, with prosecutors writing in a legal filing that “while GPS monitoring by the vendor may be in real time, PSA’s monitoring of defendants is not. PSA only works during normal business hours. Therefore, PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact.” (When would you guess that the majority of violations occur?)
Trump, of course, is not focused on the unsexy work detailed above, which could meaningfully impact which criminals get locked up and how quickly, who gets leniency and who gets surveilled and confined.”