Posted on Wednesday, August 13, 2025
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by Shane Harris
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14 Comments
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In response to President Donald Trump’s decision this week to federalize the Washington, D.C. police department and deploy the National Guard to combat crime in the nation’s capital, Democrats and the liberal media have insisted that crime rates in the city are actually down and there is nothing to worry about. That tone-deaf strategy bears a striking resemblance to Democrats’ failed messaging on the economy during last year’s presidential race and shows that liberals still haven’t learned anything from their sweeping defeat in 2024.
Soon after Trump’s press conference on Monday, where he announced that he was placing DCPD “under direct federal control,” liberals began tripping over themselves to point out that crime in D.C. is supposedly down from recent years.
“Violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote on X in a post that has garnered nearly two million views. That claim was quickly echoed across social media and parroted by major corporate media outlets. “Violent crime in D.C. has fallen in 2024 and 2025 after a 2023 spike,” CNN declared.
To hear liberals tell it, D.C. is a sparkling clean, crime-free utopia, and Donald Trump is an authoritarian bully trying to fight a problem that doesn’t exist. But that narrative very quickly breaks down when one digs just below the left’s surface-level claims.
For starters, that “30-year low” statistic is dubious at best. It comes from a Biden administration press release in January – the same administration that routinely cooked the books on jobs numbers, border crossings, and violent crime rates in other cities.
Then there’s the fact that just last month, a D.C. police commander was suspended and accused of pressuring officers to downgrade offenses to make the district’s crime rate look lower than it is. As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller aptly put it in a post on X, “Crime stats in big blue cities are fake. The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher. Everyone who lives in these areas knows this. They program their entire lives around it.”
Moreover, it is an undeniable fact that homicides in D.C. – a key metric for how violent a city actually is – are far from a 30-year low. 187 people were murdered in the nation’s capital last year. Yes, that’s down from the 274 murders and 203 murders the city saw in the exceptionally deadly years of 2023 and 2022, respectively, but it’s still far above the 166 murders seen as recently as 2019 and the 88 murders in 2012.
Even if we accept the “30-year low” line as legitimate, is that really something to celebrate? D.C. has seen exorbitant crime rates ever since Congress granted it home rule in 1973 and Democrats seized a permanent monopoly on the city’s government.
Liberals seem to want us to believe that because crime may not be as bad as it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago that Trump has no basis for restoring order to a dirty, dangerous capital city. Even in the supposedly “low” crime year of 2024, D.C. still had the fourth-highest homicide rate of any city in the country. So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 1,600 violent crimes and 16,000 total crimes in D.C. Does that sound “safe”?
But the truly telling part of this whole episode is how quick liberals were to rush to “the data” to justify their position. While conveniently ignoring shocking statistics like the fact that 5.2 percent of kids aged 10-17 in D.C. have been arrested (roughly twice the national average), liberals effectively denied that D.C. even has a crime problem at all because “the data” shows violent crime is lower than it has been previously.
This is the same tone-deaf strategy that the Biden campaign and then the Kamala Harris campaign tried when it came to the economy during last year’s presidential race. As Americans struggled under 20 percent cumulative inflation, Democrats kept insisting that the economy was actually doing quite well because certain metrics like the unemployment rate, consumer spending, and wages appeared strong. They even gave a name to their supposed success: “Bidenomics.”
But when votes were cast last November, it became clear that the Bidenomics campaign was one of the biggest unforced political errors in American history. Democrats never seemed to understand that if their rosy, upbeat messaging on the economy didn’t match up with the reality most Americans were experiencing, it would just make the public bitter and resentful. They thought that because the “official” government data showed a strong economy, Americans would simply miss the fact that everything had gotten exorbitantly expensive and dreams of starting a family, owning a home, and retiring were suddenly out of reach.
This was a massive mistake that Democrats still have not corrected. Blind deference to the “expert” class helped sink their chances in 2024, and now it’s making them look like fools in response to Trump’s decisive action to address the crime crisis in D.C. While burying their heads in dubious statistics about crime rates, they’re ignoring shocking instances of horrific violence like a congressman who was carjacked, a Senate aide stabbed just trying to get a burrito bowl, a congressional intern shot and killed near the White House, and a DOGE staffer nearly beaten to death just last week.
If Democrats couldn’t convince Americans the economy was fine when their wallets said otherwise, they won’t convince them D.C. is safe when their own eyes say it’s not.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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