> DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe.

DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.

"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."

DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups. If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk at 3am in certain neighborhoods, it had no impact on your life. Fox News likes to describe it as Sarajevo or Mogadishu but it just isn't - go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches. There certainly are crimes happening but anyone telling you it's out of control or that the police are powerless to stop it is lying to you for political reasons.

> DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups.

I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.

Objectively speaking, DC’s 27 homicides per 100k people in 2024 is almost double what it was in 2012. If actually started going back up before the pandemic. And in absolute terms, DC has about 8 times the homicide rate of a relatively safe american city like new york or san diego.

> If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk

It’s ultimately driven by gangs, but most people killed aren’t gang members per se. They’re gang adjacent, or siblings or friends who get caught up in the gang wars. Also, the gangs aggressively recruit young men in the neighborhoods where they operate. It’s very “you’re with us or against us.”

> go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches.

I’ve lived in downtown Baltimore, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. I know how cities work. But the violence is a constant for the people who live there. We got to know an Indian family who had a great Indian restaurant in the ghetto in Wilmington, which has a similar homicide rate to DC. Yeah, on any given day you won’t see someone get murdered. But they had someone get killed on the street outside their restaurant. And EMTs wouldn’t come for hours because they were worried about getting caught in a gang firefight. Then another person got shot in the street near my wife’s office at 5 am waiting for the Nike Store to open. That was just in one year. Imagine growing up there and not being rich each to isolate yourself from the violence.

> I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.

It’s the opposite: there are a handful of small hotspots which are less safe, but even those aren’t that bad. I live in a fairly mixed neighborhood (none of my immediate neighbors are white, 20% of the ward earn less than $50k, etc.) and it’s just not something people are worried about in daily life.

There is a hotspot about ¾ mile away where we had a couple of gang members kill each other. That’s not great, of course, but it’s literally one building and behind closed doors (the police arrested the perps from Maryland last year, and it’s been quiet since). Nobody else in the neighborhood is changing their plans, local businesses aren’t affected, etc. If you go by in the evening, it’s people walking dogs and kids playing, not hiding inside with the doors locked.

Again, there are real problems and I wholly support the continued programs to solve them, but the imagery being used to claim an emergency is a work of fiction. If they wanted to do something about crime, they’d start taking cars away from unsafe drivers as that’s far more likely to be harmful to most residents here.

> The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023.

Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.

Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.

[1] Here, I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C.

> Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population.

The GP elsewhere in the thread pointed out that in like-to-like comparisons of Washington, DC against peer world cities, it fares really poorly in violent crime.

> Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce

I doubt that the people who are committing crimes were disrupted from the workforce.

> DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's

Both things can be true: DC used to be worse in violent crime, and today's violent crime is still unacceptably high.

DC is part of the United States, which has high levels of income inequality and easier access to guns than any other advanced country. The drug war keeps pulling people in because we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people. In other countries, you have better medical care (fewer people buying fentanyl on the street because they can't get legal chronic pain treatment), and if people don't have easy access to guns the homicide rate is lower because while there are people just as mad at the world they're getting in fist or knife fights rather than shootouts which are more likely to be lethal and affect more people. Yes, people still get seriously hurt but if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.

In particular for DC, note also that Republicans have blocked for many years efforts by DC's government to restrict the supply of guns and the lack of a national strategy means that someone who can't buy a gun in DC goes a few miles away to Virginia. In most other countries, you don't have the option of even a short walk offering access to very different laws. This also shows up in the crime stats: in my neighborhood there've been a couple of fatal shootings over the last decade – and in every case both the perp and victim were people from Maryland who came over the border to do a drug deal because they can switch jurisdictions in 5 minutes and thus confuse a police response.

> if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.

Funnily enough, academic work suggests the exact opposite, that the homicide rate in this country could be 5x higher were it not for advancements in trauma care[0]. Inner-city hospitals are applying battlefield medicine techniques and saving lives, turning homicides into aggravated assaults.

> we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people

The state of West Virginia, which has more guns and a higher share of unhappy, economically marginalized young people than Virginia, has a lower homicide rate than its eastern neighbor.

Ultimately, we likely disagree on "the root cause of crime", as it were. I don't believe that more aid for the poor or reducing income inequality will materially reduce violent crime rates, because by and large people do not commit violent crime in order to escape poverty. Instead, people are poor for a lot of the same reasons that they commit crime: they have poor impulse control, high time preference, and little consideration for those around them. We have not yet figured out a way to apply money to people in such a way to change these undesirable behavioral patterns, so I am against spending more of the taxpayer's money in this fruitless endeavor. The ways that do work have fallen out of favor in society.

I believe what will make a material impact is lengthier sentences and more pretrial detention; that is, policy must favor the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of repeat criminals.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124155/

No, DC and Chicago are not Fallujah. I travel to DC frequently and have never had any reason to fear violent crime. I take the metro. I walk long distances, including late at night. I have relatives who live there. They do not worry about violent crime. They certainly don't consider it "Fallujah". I've also seen aides to the same republican politicians who spout all this fear mongering rhetoric out at night at DC bars without any apparent fears for their safety. Frankly, it's an incredibly insulting to say that DC is Fallujah. There is literally an article on the Department of Justice website from January with the title "Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low". The statistics that you quoted are several years out of date and you conveniently neglected to mention the decline after 2023. You chose a number from 2023 of 40 per 100k, but the number from 2024 was 27 per 100k. That's cherry-picking data to make a point. It's dishonest. You also neglect to mention the differences in data collection practices between the United States and a country like Haiti or Iraq. Exactly how trustworthy are wartime homicide statistics in a country undergoing complete social collapse? https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...

If you look at the actual list of homicides in a major American city, the victims are often people who are involved in the drug trade. Homicides are often highly concentrated in small areas. A large portion of the city sees no homicides at all in a given year. I don't know if an equivalent map exists for DC, but you can look at a map of homicides in Boston in 2024. There are a few areas where there are clusters with 2-3 homicides within a few blocks. Then there are whole neighborhoods where there are no homicides at all, or just one or two. https://www.universalhub.com/crime/murder/2024

Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.

For decades now, the media has painted a sensationalized picture of big cities. I was traveling once and was talking to an older couple from a rural area. When I told them where I lived, they were genuinely concerned for my safety. I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.

I've read the same "30 year low" press release. 30 years ago, in the 90s, DC's homicide rate was hovering around the 70-80 per 100k range, which are truly frightening numbers not be seen outside of literal wartime[0]. It's good news that violent crime is down since then, but it speaks to a blind spot[1] that you do not find the current violent crime rate to be utterly unacceptable.

> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.

I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.

> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.

As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?

[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.

I think what I was trying to convey is that the image of life in an American city that the parent was portraying, when he described a beautiful, wealthy city as "Fallujah" (which he has now deleted), and what this couple clearly had in their head, is just completely alien to most people who actually live in those cities. The impression that you get from conservative media and often local TV news is just completely divorced from reality - or at best the media has taken the experience of a relatively small number of people who live in particularly dangerous housing projects, or particularly dangerous streets, and presented it as how the city works in general. I know Boston better than Washington, so I'll use that as an example. Admittedly, it's a city with much lower crime than Washington, but I've had plenty of experiences talking to older, more conservative people who live in suburban and rural areas, and seem to think it's crime ridden. I used to work in several neighborhoods that are considered dangerous - Roxbury and Mattapan, and I've spent time in some of the rougher parts of Dorchester. I've been inside a number of low-income housing projects. I've walked and ridden buses in these neighborhoods. What I noticed was that whatever concern I felt about my safety came from things that I had heard from the media, not from anything that I personally saw, or even anything that happened to anyone I knew. There are a few exceptions to this, like a few blocks in the South End where homeless addicts congregate where I would genuinely be concerned about something happening. The neighborhoods where I've lived - which are not necessarily affluent - have all felt perfectly safe, with the exception of some petty thefts - particularly bike thefts.

I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.

Boston and New York are in a totally different league than DC. Even at DC’s best in 2012, it had a homicide rate more than three times as high as those cities. And currently, DC’s homicide rate is more than six times as high.

And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.

The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.