Law and Order Works: Crime Plummets in Washington After Trump Takes Action
Jarrett Stepman /
For too long, the crime problems festering in Washington have been a national embarrassment.
Thanks to President Donald Trump, that shame is lifting as crime rates plummet in the District of Columbia to levels unthinkable just a few years ago.
All it took was a different attitude and a little action.
Trump announced in August, shortly after the murder of two young embassy workers, that he’d had enough of the crime and would be deploying National Guard troops to the city.
“Citizens, tourists, and staff alike are unable to live peacefully in the nation’s capital, which is under siege from violent crime,” he said in a statement. “It is a point of national disgrace that Washington, D.C., has a violent crime rate that is higher than some of the most dangerous places in the world. It is my duty to our citizens and federal workers to secure the safety and the peaceful functioning of our nation, the federal government, and our city.”
At the time, this move was dismissed by media detractors and chided by prominent Democrats who lashed out at Trump’s intolerable act of leadership.
But it turns out you can just do things. Washington didn’t have to have high crime. Trump’s “surge” is paying off.
Since Trump’s announcement, the District of Columbia has witnessed a staggering reduction in crime that far outpaces the already impressive declines across the nation. So far this year, there have been only 20 recorded homicides in the District.
If that trend holds, 2026’s final tally could end up well below the previous modern low of 88 homicides recorded in 2012.
It’s not just homicides—a good stat to track because of the difficulty in manipulating the numbers—other kinds of crime are going down too.
The White House posted some of the best numbers, which can be found on the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia’s website.
It’s not just statistics. Residents of the city say they feel the city is changing for the better.
These positive changes even seem to be happening in the city’s most dangerous areas.
It’s a remarkable turnaround from just a few years ago when, following the George Floyd riots and COVID-19 lockdowns, crime spiraled out of control. The city endured 226 homicides in 2021, 203 in 2022, and a staggering 274 in 2023.
This was the “Black Lives Matter” and “defund the police” era in which blue cities across the nation foolishly embraced the Left’s “solutions” to what they called the “systemic racism” of policing.
Ironically—though I’d say predictably—it was also this era in which a far higher number of black lives were taken due to the lawlessness and criminality created by left-wing ideology making its way into policy.
So, after suffering nearly 300 homicides three years ago, it would take a massive summer surge to even reach 100 by the end of this year.
That plummeting motor vehicle theft statistic should stand out too.
Since 2020, Washington practically became the carjacking capital of the country.
In that horrible year of 2023, there were nearly 1,000 carjackings in the city, in addition to other vehicle thefts. Much of this was driven by juveniles who faced absurdly low penalties for what is a very serious crime.
It was during this time, when homicides and carjackings were out of control, that D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb infamously said that the city “cannot prosecute and arrest” its way out of the problem.
Yes, it could. And that’s how we get to the fuller story of Washington’s seemingly miraculous crime drop.
X user “Austin Justice” had an excellent summary of how things turned around so quickly.
The most notable change from the top was Trump’s deployment of the National Guard.
As Justice explained, this filled the gap of “a 50-year low in local police staffing—a hole created by city council budget cuts that some estimate will take a decade to fully close.”
Mass makes a difference. The National Guard surge allows the police to do their jobs more effectively.
But it’s not enough to simply arrest criminals. That’s where the justice system comes in.
The city has a new U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, who has aggressively pursued prosecutions, a far cry from President Joe Biden’s appointee Matthew Graves, whose record on that front could fairly be called “abysmal.”
Pirro stepped up efforts to charge some juveniles as adults for violent crimes.
As Cully Stimson, the acting director of the Institute for Constitutional Government at The Heritage Foundation, noted, the arrest-to-offense ratio for carjackings was an extremely low 25% in the Biden years.
But in Trump’s first year in office, there is now a “58% arrest-to-offense” ratio in the city due to the willingness to prosecute more 16- and 17-year-old carjackers as adults.
And that really is most of the story. More police, more arrests, more prosecutions, less crime. It’s common sense, not rocket science.
What the District of Columbia is experiencing is just a small taste of what it’s like to not live under a leftist, Democrat regime. That isn’t so bad, is it?