I missed this when it was published last weekend but caught up to it today via a link in David French’s column. Basically it’s three NY Times columnists—David French, Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle— doing a podcast discussion about Trump’s attempt to tackle crime in Washington, DC. Given the lineup, this mostly goes exactly as you’d expect it to go with maybe one surprise that I’ll get to in a moment.
But it starts out, like every discussion of this topic, with Cottle pointing out that crime in DC is down. “Trump claims he’s doing this because of a public safety emergency here in the District, though in fact, violent crime is at a 30-year low.”
The transcript was probably prepared by AI and it doesn’t really capture the smug, NPR-wannabe tone of what Cottle is saying. What she actually says is “Trump claims he’s doing this because of a “public safety emergency” (she actually does the air quotes with her fingers at the bottom of the frame) here in the District, though in fact, violent crime is at a 30-year low.” And while she’s saying the part about a 30-year low, the camera cuts to David French who is nodding along.
Ayup. Ayup. You’re so right.
She then kicks it over to Jamelle Bouie who points out, correctly, that the place where the National Guard is station aren’t places where the crime is mostly happening.
Violent crime is at a 30-year low. I think it’s worth emphasizing that most of these troops are deployed to areas running the White House, National Mall, downtown, so on and so forth. If you were to make a heat map of criminal activity in Washington, D.C., you would find that it is not in those places. If you were going to do this, you would put soldiers in other places. And this gets to a reality about crime that’s important to understand: Most violent crime happens in specific, discrete geographic areas among specific individuals.
He’s arguing that this is (or is going to be) ineffective, which may be true or may be just what progressives hope will be true. In any case, I think it wouldn’t be hard to counter this argument is several ways. For one, the National Guard aren’t the only law enforcement resources showing up in DC. The FBI, ICE, DEA and probably others have been walking the streets as well and not just at the National Mall. But also, I think it’s reasonable to say that MPD resources are fungible in some ways. If you have a few hundred National Guardsmen wandering around the mall, you probably don’t need as many beat cops in those areas. You can probably redeploy some of them to the higher crime neighborhoods where the “specific individuals” are committing most of the crime.
Or maybe not. I don’t know if this has actually happened but I suspect Jamelle Bouie doesn’t know either and hasn’t really thought about it. This is just one more moment for him to attack Trump. That’s what you get.
Cottle asks French if what Trump is doing is legal and he says yes, probably it is.
That’s a great question. The answer is … probably? We’ll see. The “probably” part is that, look, the president has more authority over the National Guard in Washington, D.C., than anywhere else — more inherent, automatic authority. The Guard is under his direct control.
Whereas in the States, the Guard is under the control of the governors unless it is federalized. Here you don’t really have to go through that step. Also, there’s been a longstanding D.O.J. position that the Guard can be used for law enforcement purposes in D.C. more than in other places, without violating the Posse Comitatus Act, which is this post-Reconstruction law prohibiting the use of federal troops for law enforcement.
And then, inevitably, you get this comment from Jamelle Bouie offering another reason why Trump focused on DC. Can you guess?
In terms of D.C. being carefully chosen, it’s also a city where the president’s reliance on tropes about crime — and dystopian crime, and all these things — I think is, I wouldn’t say more effective, but there might be a more willing audience for it. For the simple reason that D.C. has long been known as a majority-Black city. It’s not quite majority-Black anymore; I think it’s just under half. But it has this identity.
And that identity is very much a part of the president’s demonization of D.C. as kind of a John Carpenter-esque hellscape — demonization of the residents of D.C. as essentially incapable of self-government. It plugs into longstanding tropes about the ability of Black Americans to exist in mainstream society — to put it in the most sterile way I possibly can.
Give him credit, I guess, for not making this part of his first answer. He’s showing restraint here, but not much. The chances that he was going to call Trump racist before this discussion ended was always 100 percent. And I’m saying that in the most sterile way I possibly can. The less sterile way would be: One-trick pony does it’s one trick!
Cottle brings things back to what prompted all of this by telling the story of Big Balls.
Cottle: Yeah. David, you can also address the broader view of this, but I think one of the issues is that D.C. has long had a problem with how it deals with crime. And then you have a couple of high-profile incidents that Trump can seize on — like I think this was all provoked because a member of the administration got his butt kicked at 3 a.m. by a group of people in a fairly popular area, in a part of D.C. considered safer than others, right?
Bouie: Can we say Big Balls on here?
Cottle is describing what happened in the most anodyne way possible because the ugly details are pretty ugly. A group of 10 teenagers walked over to a car where Ed Coristine, aka Big Balls, was talking with his girlfriend. The mob demanded the keys to the car. This was an attempted carjacking. Coristine pushed his girlfriend into the car and then said no at which point the gang of thugs beat him bloody. It might have been even worse except there were cops nearby who saw what was happening. They pulled up before the teens were done dishing out the beating. Who knows how it would have ended if they hadn’t been there.
As we’ve already seen, Jamelle Bouie is usually the first person to make race the subtext of every story and yet he has nothing to say abut this. Coristine is white and at least several of the teens who attacked him are black. He skips right past that for some reason. No need to mention it.
Finally, you get to the one surprising moment in the discussion. David French, to his credit, points out that while crime might be down in DC it’s still pretty bad.
French: Here’s one caution I would add: Yes, crime in D.C., violent crime in D.C.’s at a 30-year low, but it’s a pretty violent city relative to other U.S. cities. There are also a lot of people — especially those who are not used to and have not seen the improvement in D.C. since the pandemic — who, if they come from other cities, might find the kind of low-level disorder in D.C. pretty shocking. So I think one mistake people can make here is to say: Look, he’s doing this, and D.C.’s fine. D.C.’s fine. I don’t think we should say D.C.’s fine. What we should say is that D.C. is improving substantially, and this is not the way to achieve further improvements.
And this is a consistent pattern in dealing with Trump. Often people will look at an institution or a place that he’s attacking and there’s this instinct to rally completely to its defense. Well, sometimes these institutions do have problems. They do need reform. It’s just not his reform.
This is the point that Trump and others have been making from day one. Crime in DC is several times higher than crime in New York or Los Angeles. Better in this case is not the same as good. So why didn’t French say this up front when Cottle opened the whole discussion with crime is down? I don’t know. He just nodded along and then much later decided to mention that actually there is a problem in DC that shouldn’t be dismissed.
The discussion goes on with Bouie arguing DC doesn’t have a crime problem so much as a “disorder” problem, by which he means homeless people, etc. That’s wrong because the murder rate is still quite high so this isn’t just about disorder, but it leads to a discussion of crime and a real show-stopper from David French.
French: The massive crime spike — especially the murder spike — occurred in the United States during Trump’s first term, in 2020, when he was president. So the murder rate absolutely spiked in Trump’s last term, and big cities, as well as American state, local and federal governments, have been struggling to get it under control since. But if you look at the overall trend, it’s moving in very strongly positive ways, and that started during the Biden administration.
Biden inherited an absolute crime disaster from Trump 1.0. So this idea that Trump is the guy who can fix crime doesn’t hold up — the last American crime disaster occurred under Trump.
I really do try to give David French credit where due but come on, man. What touched off the huge spike in violent crime in 2020? Some say the pandemic but if you look closely at the timing it coincided pretty precisely with the death of George Floyd and the protests/riots that followed. Some call it the Ferguson Effect.
Trump, even at the time, was one of the people who wanted to see the National Guard called out to deal with the chaos. He certainly was not on the side of the people burning down city blocks, setting up autonomous zones and demonizing the police. That was BLM’s project and they were backed by people on the left including a lot of elected Democrats. Reducing that reality to the claim that crime spiked under Trump and Biden got it under control is pretty absurd. In fact there’s no way French actually believes that’s a fair accounting of the hot summer of 2020. This is a level of dishonesty that’s hard to take, not unlike his absurd argument that Kamala Harris was the pro-life choice in the last election.
Anyway, it’s the NY Times opinion section, so I don’t know why I expected something better.
