On Monday, August 11th, President Trump announced that “Washington D.C had become a situation of complete and total lawlessness”. He was going to solve that problem by deploying the national guard to help the police with the “excess of crime”.
He claimed that this was “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor, and worse”. He said that Washington D.C had been “taken over by violent gangs, bloodthirsty criminals, drugged out maniacs, and homeless people”.
Washington D.C’s Mayor Muriel Bowser contradicted those claims. Data from D.C’s Metropolitan Police Department shows violent crime rates as being down 28 percent this year— and lowest it has been in over 30 years.
Trump disregards this fact and states that “D.C gave fake crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety”. He points to the fact that Commander of the MPD’s third district is under investigation for allegedly manipulating the crime stats as proof. While this is true even if the Commander has manipulated crime stats, it would not likely have a significant effect on the rest of the city.
Crime stats have gone down since the national guard arrived but some question if it’s worth the estimated 1 million dollars a day or more it’s costing to have them employed. Not all of the National Guard have been working on crime either; residents of Washington D.C have spotted them shoveling woodchips, raking leaves, scrubbing roadways, collecting trash and weeding. One resident called them the “most expensive gardening crew ever”.
National Guard in D.C, Creative Commons Attribution, photo taken by the National Guard,
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/33252741@N08/54728085282/ |
Residents of D.C are split on how they feel about the national guard in their city. According to Quinnipiac University/Poll voters 51-46 percent oppose the national guard occupation.
Donald Trump is already making plans about what he’s going to do with the national guard after they leave Washington D.C. He has talked about sending them to reduce the crime rate in cities such as: Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Oakland, and New York.
However, for the present they are still in Washington D.C.