On the menu today: Don’t worry, America; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declares he feels “perfectly safe” when walking around Washington. That might have something to do with his likely 20-something-member round-the-clock security detail. What follows is a deep dive into how the District of Columbia became so ineffective at fighting crime.
How D.C. Became So Ineffective at Fighting Crime
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in an interview with TikTok content creator Aaron Parnas, Wednesday:
Parnas: I want to get your reaction to everything that’s happening in DC. But first, a lot of folks on the Republican side, your Republican colleagues say that they are very scared to walk outside in DC, that they think this is completely the right thing to do. Senator, are you scared walking around Washington DC these days?
Schumer: I walk around all the time. I wake up early in the morning, sometimes, and take a nice walk as the sun is rising around some of the capital and the other monuments and things and I feel perfectly safe. They’re full of it.
As you would expect, Schumer has a security detail. We don’t know the size of it, but back in 2017, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, then president pro tempore of the Senate, said that “23 armed guards protect him and his wife around the clock in and around the Capitol and beyond.” It is reasonable to conclude that Schumer’s security detail is comparable in size and effectiveness. It may well even be larger, in light of the increasing levels of threats to members of Congress.
There are few CEOs who have a round-the-clock security detail the size of Hatch’s and presumably Schumer’s.
Beyond the issue of a man with a large security detail believing his experience is representative, there is the minor complication that the immediate vicinity of the U.S. Capitol building and the monuments on the National Mall are generally not where the crimes are occurring. In fact, on the district government’s own map at that link, the only parts of the city that aren’t covered in blue dots representing the location of a reported crime in 2025 are the National Mall and the parks.
Schumer is not alone in dismissing the seriousness of Washington, D.C.’s crime problem. His counterpart in the U.S. House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, posted on X Sunday, “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” House and Senate leadership, which includes Jeffries, are provided with a security detail by U.S. Capitol Police as part of standard congressional protection protocols. This level of protection is not provided to rank-and-file members unless there is a specific threat against them.
I’m glad that Schumer and Jeffries, with their large, well-armed security details, feel safe walking around Washington. But not every member of Congress or their staffers have been so lucky:
- In February 2023, Representative Angie Craig (D., Minn.), was assaulted in her apartment elevator; the perpetrator’s attorney “said his client faced a number of issues at the time of the assault, including drug abuse and homelessness, and that he’s been diagnosed schizophrenia and mental disabilities.”
- In October 2023, Representative Henry Cuellar (D., Texas) was thankfully unhurt when masked carjackers held him at gunpoint “and made off with his white 2019 Toyota C-HR LE at K Street and New Jersey Avenue SE in Navy Yard.”
- In May 2024, a staffer for Representative Sara Jacobs (D., Calif.) was carjacked at gunpoint in Navy Yard by two juveniles.
- In June 2024, Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, a congressional intern for Representative Ron Estes (R., Kan.), was fatally shot in a drive-by incident in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest Washington, near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
So no, not every Democrat on Capitol Hill will agree with Schumer’s breezy assessment that life in Washington is “perfectly safe.”
It is not hard to come up with fair or better criticisms of President Trump’s recently announced efforts to crack down on crime in the District of Columbia. Most notably, these moves are, under the law, temporary. As the editors of NR lay out:
As Americans from coast to coast learned the hard way in the late 20th century, the best way to fight lawbreaking and disorder in our cities is through sustained active policing, by putting more cops on the streets, by focusing on crime hot-spots and gang members, and by putting violent criminals behind bars. But hiring, training, and deploying more cops takes time, and it takes even more time to see results.
D.C. needs more cops. It needs tougher shoplifting laws. It needs sane policies to control the growth of tent cities and vagrant encampments. These are chronic problems that, unfortunately, aren’t susceptible to instant fixes.
Putting a few hundred FBI agents and DEA agents out to patrol the streets won’t hurt, but it does mean those agents won’t be performing their usual duties.
The District just hasn’t been that interested in hiring more cops in the past decade or so. From 2012 to 2023, the D.C. police budget remained pretty flat, when adjusted for inflation. But while the budget has remained flat, the number of cops on the beat has declined, from “3,800 officers in 2020 to approximately 3,100 officers today.” You really can’t take away roughly 700 cops from a city and not expect to see higher crime rates. For perspective, the entire city of Oakland has budgeting for 678 sworn police officers. (Then again, city officials out there may feel safer because the Raiders aren’t in town anymore.)
The city has had other funding priorities. Last year, the District agreed to a deal where the city is purchasing Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Capitals NHL team and Washington Wizards NBA team, for $87.5 million, and lease the arena back to Monumental Sports & Entertainment founder Ted Leonsis.
For more than three decades, a stern, gravelly voiced announcer has informed any of us watching NBC in prime time, “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders.”
In the District of Columbia, the presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney handles the prosecution of both federal crimes and most serious local crimes, unlike other jurisdictions where a locally elected or appointed prosecutor handles local criminal cases. D.C. does have a position of attorney general, which focuses on civil litigation, minor infractions, and certain misdemeanor offenses. The current officeholder, Brian Schwalb, recently told angry residents, “We cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it.” Schwalb has had other priorities in recent years, like investigating Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo. Two years later, no charges have been filed against Leo.
Unless the U.S. attorney calls dibs on a major crime, the city attorney general prosecutes juveniles. From 2016 to 2022, juveniles in the district committed crimes at twice the national average, and “the percentage of homicides and non-fatal shootings perpetrated by youth aged 15-to-20 almost doubled in the three years from 2021 thru June 2024.”
Maybe if the district had an attorney general who was more interested in incarcerating violent juvenile offenders and less interested in fruitless investigations of major conservative activists, the city would be in better shape.
I have no idea whether longtime Fox News Channel television host Jeanine Pirro, who was sworn in May 14, will make a good U.S. Attorney for the district. (She lays out her agenda in this Washington Post op-ed.) But I do know that in recent years, some of her predecessors absolutely failed in their duties. From back in March 2023:
Most arrests by police officers in D.C. do not result in criminal charges filed in court, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In fiscal year 2022, which ended in September, the USAO received 15,315 arrests from police working in D.C. and declined to prosecute 10,261, or 67 percent of them. That figure includes 8,238 declined misdemeanor arrests (72 percent) and 2,023 declined felony arrests (53 percent).
Democrats could accurately argue that Trump’s moves represent a Band-Aid on a serious problem that requires a more systemic approach. But instead, they’re insisting that the problem Trump is trying to address doesn’t exist or isn’t serious. Or you see arguments that Americans erroneously believe murder rates in U.S. cities have increased since 1990. That’s true enough as far as it goes. But to have a decent memory of the crime rate in major cities in the U.S. in 1990, you need to be, what, at least 45 years old? And as I noted, people’s perception of whether crime and murder rates are going up or going down is their perception of now compared to the much more recent past, rather than 35 years ago.
Back when Joe Biden was in the White House, I observed that the former president had a terrible habit of denying that certain problems were actual problems until far too late, allowing those problems to get significantly worse — a rising inflation rate, a worsening security situation in Afghanistan, increasing levels of illegal immigration and insufficient border security. I thought this was a Joe Biden problem, but it increasingly appears to be a Democratic Party problem, or perhaps an American-politician problem, or a human-nature problem.
We’ve already gone through this dynamic with Trump and the issue of crime, less than a year ago! During the lone presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, ABC News moderator David Muir insisted, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” But there were fair questions about changes in the methodology of the FBI’s crime statistics in the years after the pandemic:
[In 2021], Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit their data. Philadelphia reported nine months’ worth of data; Chicago reported seven months; and Phoenix reported only one month. For 2021, the FBI noted, “crime estimates will fill in the gaps where data is not available.”
In 2022, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia and Chicago got the data in, but Phoenix didn’t, and neither did New York or Los Angeles. Crime statistics that don’t include information from the two largest U.S. cities would seem to guarantee an incomplete understanding of the state of crime in America.
Meanwhile, the National Crime Victimization Survey, collected by the U.S. Department of Justices’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, found that violent crime technically declined from 2022 to 2023, but it’s a decline of one-tenth of a percentage point, so . . . not much. We should also note that property crimes increased slightly.
Harris argued that the Biden administration officials (and implicitly, Democratic governors and mayors) were making good progress on reducing crime. The 2024 electorate was not convinced.
People who are very, very far from being Donald Trump fans are screaming at the Democratic Party like the audience of a horror movie, desperately pleading with the protagonist to not go in there. CNN contributor S. E. Cupp, on her Substack:
Rather than admit something that’s obvious to anyone who’s spent even a little bit of time in DC in the past few years, which is that the city looks, feels, and is unsafe, they will embark upon the time-honored Dem tradition of willfully losing the argument to Republicans.
Here’s the playbook — see if it sounds familiar:
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Allow an obvious problem like gang violence, carjackings, shoplifting, organized retail theft, drugs, homelessness, or illegal immigration, to metastasize unchecked.
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Ignore it long enough for Republicans to discover and own it.
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Rather than join them in their anger and concern, righteously tell voters the problem doesn’t exist.
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Insist voters are racist, sexist, xenophobic, or stupid if they believe the problem does exist.
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Indignantly and condescendingly point to charts and stats proving, if only nominally, the problem isn’t *technically as bad as Trump says it is – because charts and stats are how people decide what to feel.
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Wait for Trump to speak insensitively and offensively about the problem, and hope that makes the problem go away.
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Defend the criminals instead of the victims.
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While doing nothing to solve the problem, wait for a shining example of the problem to emerge and give Republicans a chance to nationalize it. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one.
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Oppose obvious solutions because they are suggested by Republicans.
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Cede both the problem AND the solution to Trump.
Her assessment is painfully accurate.
Is this a post-Ferguson, post-George Floyd hangover among Democrats? Did they get themselves locked into a narrative where the cops were always the bad guys and the people being arrested were always the victims? Keep in mind that Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot,” in Ferguson, Mo., and police shootings of unarmed black men are relatively rare, 2 percent of all individuals shot by an on-duty police officer between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2024.)
Our old friends Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson have been thinking about the influence of postmodernism in American politics in recent years, particularly among the MAGA crowd. It doesn’t make it right, but after watching progressives effectively Jedi-Mind-Tricking vast swaths of the American public into believing certain narratives, it’s easy to understand why frustrated folks on the right would be tempted to try the same trick.
For a long stretch, Democrats could push a fundamentally inaccurate narrative and convince a sizable chunk of the public to buy into it. But — depending upon the issue — reality always wins eventually. People will notice that their grocery bills are significantly higher, or if they see more homeless people on the streets, or if walking the streets of Washington neighborhoods doesn’t feel as safe as it did a few years ago.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it, yesterday was a busy day on the Corner: the 2020 Census mistakes that spurred part of this furious redistricting fight, another dollop of light communism from the Trump administration, and of course, the terrifying and serious menace of Colorado bunnies with tentacles.