“Trump’s comments came in response to questions about the assault of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old man known as “big balls” who played a prominent role in the administration’s efforts to slash government under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Coristine, who now works for the Social Security Administration though Musk has left the government and DOGE has been scaled back, told police he was attacked by a group of juveniles as part of an apparent attempted carjacking about 3 a.m Sunday in Northwest D.C.”
“Texas already has several mechanisms to use in coaxing the Democrats back. Each day they’re gone, the fleeing Democrats incur a $500-per-day fine. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott also released an order for their arrest by the Texas Department of Public Safety, describing the Democrats’ conduct as “abandonment or forfeiture.” Republicans in the Texas House, meanwhile, have issued arrest warrants for the absent Democrats, and Attorney General Ken Paxton—who is challenging Cornyn in his re-election bid—has called for their removal from office.
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Regardless of how involved the FBI will become, the bureau’s involvement at all degrades the principle of federalism by infringing upon Texas’s authority to discipline its lawmakers. It is also the most recent example of the Trump Justice Department being weaponized for political gain and tasked with duties outside its standard wheelhouse.
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Though Patel dismissed concerns during his confirmation hearing that he would weaponize the FBI, he seems to have set his sights on the Texas Democrats, despite Trump’s Day One executive order to end the “weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
While the Democrats’ plan is an attempt to circumvent a vote, they’ve broken no federal laws or statutes. There is simply no need for the FBI’s involvement.”
“I’m hugely in favor of stopping violent crime, but using federal agents to get the job done—and perhaps more worryingly, having the president direct how minors are charged—is likely to get into sticky territory rather quickly. “Because D.C. is not a state, the federal government has unique authority to exert control over city affairs—even amid objections from the residents and locally elected government,” notes The Washington Post. “The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave D.C. residents the ability to elect their own mayor and council members. A federal takeover of the D.C. police force would be an extraordinary assertion of power in a place where local leaders have few avenues to resist federal encroachment.””
“Trump does have the power to oversee what happens in D.C. because of its unique role as home to the nation’s seat of government. The law gives the president the power to temporarily take over the city’s law enforcement operations.
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The president’s description of crime in Washington, D.C., is not reflected in official statistics, which show that the city had its lowest violent crime rate in over 30 years in 2024.”
“”What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writes Reason’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.”
“A new report by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found that homicides are significantly down in major cities across the country compared to last year, and the Trump administration is claiming its mass deportation program is part of the reason.
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First, one must begin by congratulating the Trump administration on its sudden, enthusiastic embrace of crime statistics. Trump and his reelection campaign repeatedly claimed in 2024 that crime was spiking even though it had been generally dropping since 2022.
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“there were issues with the FBI crime data, which were eventually revised, but the data generally jibed with what other public safety researchers were reporting: that crime in 2024 was continuing to go down.
Now that those numbers are politically useful, the Trump administration and its allies would like to take a very early victory lap.
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there is no evidence yet of any deterrent effect, or that crime is falling now because of the administration’s mass deportation program, rather than for whatever reason it was falling in the past. Quantifying the effects of laws and law enforcement—and attempting to attribute causation to dips and spikes in crime—is a notoriously tricky problem in criminal justice research, and it usually takes years to collect and analyze the data.
On its face, the claim that Trump’s immigration enforcement is driving down crime runs into the problem that most of the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals. About 60 percent of people arrested by ICE between January and June had no criminal record. In fact, the Trump administration’s quotas for arrests and deportations have forced ICE and DHS to stop prioritizing investigations of criminal networks and serious offenders.
There may well be an incapacitative effect on crime from the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportations, but even then, it would likely be statistically minor. Most studies that have attempted to quantify how much the “mass incarceration” era contributed to the national drop in crime that began in the mid-’90s have pegged it somewhere between single digits and 25 percent. And that represented the largest buildup of prisons and prison populations in U.S. history.
Crime also fell during the Obama administration and the second half of the Biden administration, but no one suggested that Joe Biden’s executive order banning police chokeholds or Barack Obama’s lax marijuana enforcement were responsible for safer cities.”
U.S. murder rate is way higher than other developed countries. Our non-gun murder rate is normal, but our gun-murder rate is huge.
Much gun violence is not rational. It’s not clearly motivated by money or lack of fear of the justice system. It’s just two guys getting into an argument who fail to solve it peacefully and someone pulls a gun.
Parts of certain cities are overwhelmed with crime, so children are often left to fend for themselves. This develops a culture and an intuitive sense that if I don’t respond to provocation with violence, I will be taken advantage of. This leads people to instinctively respond to perceived provocation with deadly force.
Although gang violence is a big problem, most shootings are not gang related.
“The crowd near Los Angeles City Hall had by Sunday evening reached an uneasy detente with a line of grim-faced police officers.
The LAPD officers gripped “less lethal” riot guns, which fire foam rounds that leave red welts and ugly bruises on anyone they hit. Demonstrators massed in downtown Los Angeles for the third straight day. Some were there to protest federal immigration sweeps across the county — others appeared set on wreaking havoc.
Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has drawn a distinction between protesters and masked “anarchists” who he said were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.
Jonas March, who was filming the protests as an independent journalist, dropped to the floor and tried to army-crawl away.
“As soon as I stood up, they shot me in the a—,” the 21-year-old said.
“When I look at the people who are out there doing the violence, that’s not the people that we see here in the day who are out there legitimately exercising their 1st Amendment rights,” McDonnell said Sunday. “These are people who are all hooded up — they’ve got a hoodie on, they’ve got face masks on.”
“They’re people that do this all the time,” he said. “They get away with whatever they can. Go out there from one civil unrest situation to another, using the same or similar tactics frequently. And they are connected.””
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“the unrest has trained attention on a narrow slice of the region — the civic core of Los Angeles — where protests have devolved into clashes with police and made-for-TV scenes of chaos: Waymo taxis on fire. Vandals defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti. Masked men lobbing chunks of concrete at California Highway Patrol officers keeping protesters off the 101 Freeway.”
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“The LAPD arrested 50 people over the weekend. Capt. Raul Jovel, who oversaw the department’s response to the protests, said those arrested included a man accused of ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers and another suspect who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail.
McDonnell said investigators will scour video from police body cameras and footage posted on social media to identify more suspects.
“The number of arrests we made will pale in comparison to the number of arrests that will be made,” McDonnell said.”