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As the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Trump administration’s takeover of the Washington DC police force begins to fade, the results are coming in, and they are nothing short of extraordinary.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the nation’s capital has had no murders for seven days, something that had not been achieved since March and something I can find no recent record of in summer months when the murder rate is typically at its highest.
HUNDREDS ARRESTED AS TRUMP’S WASHINGTON, DC, CRIME CRACKDOWN HITS FULL STRIDE
Last Monday, when a man was tragically gunned down in Logan Circle just hours after the Trump takeover, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., took to social media to say that “Trump owns this. No word if the congressman agrees Trump also owns the lives saved this past week.
And it’s not just murder, according to the local police union. Robbery dropped 46% in the week after the takeover, carjackings were down a whopping 83%, and violent crime down 22%. Who could possibly argue against that?
What DC needed was not a slow and steady approach to crime that fluctuates the rates here and there. It needed a shock to the system, and it got one. The patient is responding very well.
The lesson here, as Shakespeare put it, is “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,” which is to say that history shows us that cleaning up urban crime is not a slow, laborious process, but one to be attacked fast and aggressively.
In his first term as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani oversaw a 60% drop in Gotham’s murder rate, and a violent crime drop of 56%, much of it in his first two years.
One of Rudy’s first acts as hizzoner was shut down the adult movie theaters in Times Square, which had turned a tourist mecca into a glass and steel valley of squalor, crime, and depravity.
As the peep shows and live nude dancers were banished, so too was the high crime in drugs, prostitution and violence that went along with them.
The only real question left to ask about Trump’s efforts to fight crime in DC is, why didn’t we do this sooner?
It looks a lot like what the National Guard has succeeded in doing outside of Union Station in Washington, which has long been a hive of homelessness, drug use, and even tent cities.
Similarly, flooding the District with law enforcement is having the same impact it did back in early 1990s New York. Criminals understand their chances of being caught committing a crime have just skyrocketed.
A few more years of this and you might be able to buy toothpaste and deodorant that isn’t under lock and key at a CVS.
The only real question left to ask about Trump’s efforts to fight crime in DC is, why didn’t we do this sooner?
The answer is the liberal backlash to the successful crime initiatives of the 1990s, not just in New York, but in other cities that also adopted tactics like broken window policing.
That backlash, in the form of cashless bail, reduced police forces and George Soros-backed district attorneys, gave back many of the gains in fighting crime that had been won.
In many instances, the Giuliani-era policies were defeated by wealthy elites in safe neighborhoods who thought they were doing something good, not condemning their poorer fellow citizens to a crime-ridden existence.
By and large, this is the same demographic that protests Trump’s anti-crime approach.
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If the results and numbers from President Trump’s first week in charge of the DC police can be maintained, and there is no reason to think it can’t, then there is no political or rhetorical force on Earth that can stop it.
Swalwell is absolutely right: Trump owns this remarkable drop in crime in Washington that we are witnessing, just as his Democrats own the killing fields they allowed it and so many of our cities to become in the first place.
For the first time in a long time in our capital, there is hope that children being murdered in gang shootouts can be a rare tragedy again, not a predictable occurrence.
Many years from now, as the cherry blossoms bloom in Washington, there are going to be people alive who wouldn’t be if not for Trump’s actions to punish crime. What could be a more important job for our political leadership?
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