What's your take on the article saying that D.C.'s crime rate is at a 30 year low? Do you feel that things in big cities are so bad that an overreach of powers is justified in an attempt to fix it?
People in this thread are focusing on change in crime instead of the total rate of crime. The bottom line is that total crime in Washington DC is one of the highest among states and cities and is a clear outlier.
It's 19th of 83 (just barely making it inside the top quarter percentile) large population centers in the US, with 5,223 per 100,000 (~0.052 Per Capita) people Reported Incidents of Crime (all types) if using the adjusted[0] crime rate. If you use the data unadjusted for differences in population reporting data, it drops to 30th of 100. Via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... which is primarily sourced from FBI Crime Data Explorer https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads
Also worthy of note is FBI's Caution Against (Crime) Ranking:
> Each year when Crime in the United States is published, many entities—news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation—use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.
0: "For the 2019 population estimates used in this table, the FBI computed individual rates of growth from one year to the next for every city/town and county using 2010 decennial population counts and 2011 through 2018 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Each agency’s rates of growth were averaged; that average was then applied and added to its 2018 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2019 population estimate"
I don't think I would use the word justified. I would say as someone that's lived in a high crime area that I'm in support of trying to reduce crime rates in areas with high crime rates. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reduce the crime. Trump lives in DC. He works and his employees work in the DC area. They want to take action to reduce crime.
I spent some of my life watching people on TV demanding to defund the police and all the other nonsense while they lived in low crime areas and didn't have to suffer from the policies they are promulgating on poor people. I wish trump would do this where I used to live to be honest.
That being said, I would like to mention a basic theory that I have. If you're poor, you're often forced to buy the cheapest options in terms of housing or used cars, etc. When a neighborhood improves and is "cleaned up", property values and rents rise. Suddenly the neighborhood you live in is becomes unaffordable for poor people.
Essentially, there is an economic trap: affordability often comes bundled with low quality, and improving quality often erases affordability when talking about things like used goods or housing. It's not necessarily clear that poor people are the recipient of the benefits of lower crime in inner cities, because without high crime rates, inner cities are prime top tier real estate.
> I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reduce the crime.
This is the bailey of your motte and bailey argument. The motte is the implication that the National Guard should do this (or rather, shouldn't not do this). Regardless of it being good to try to reduce crime, this is a bad way to try to reduce crime.
Probably not without cooperation from municipal authorities which doesn't appear to be on the table.
There's no federal police force (other than maybe the coast guard and ICE neither of which really have jurisdiction here) so yeah the national guard is the least heavy alternative.
Thanks for sharing the link, I hadn't seen that before! Very serious allegations there.
> Calling in the guard is not overreach when a city is demanding it through inaction.
Is the city calling for protection, though? There's a big difference between police departments fabricating data and a need for intervention, whether through taking control of the city police or bringing in the national guard. What's the actual situation? Why is the Trump administration militarizing the city instead of running statistics to get actual crime numbers?
