President Donald Trump, justifying his temporary federal takeover of policing in the nation’s capital, claimed at a press conference Monday that the violent crime situation in Washington, DC, “is getting worse, not getting better.” He asserted in an executive order that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia” and that there is “rising violence in the capital.”
But violence in the capital is actually falling. After a spike in 2023, violent crime declined in 2024 and has declined again so far in 2025.
Washington has been a relatively high-crime place for decades, with a homicide rate that has persistently been among the country’s worst for big cities – though the district has gotten markedly safer since the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. And Washington suffered a sharp increase in violence in 2023, which included its highest number of homicides since the late 1990s and a near-doubling of reported carjackings compared to the previous year.
Trump highlighted that 2023 spike on Monday. He didn’t acknowledge, though, that the trend has since sharply reversed.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, wrote in a blog post Monday: “The bottom line is that violent crime in DC is currently declining and the city’s reported violent crime rate is more or less as low now as it has been since the 1960s. (Standard disclaimer that not all crimes are reported to police.) The city’s official violent crime rate in 2024 was the...
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