On an evening in late July, just blocks from the Washington, D.C., rowhouse my wife and I share with our two boys, a shootout erupted between two groups of people. Injuries resulted; cars and homes were riddled with bullets, and police determined more than 140 shots were fired.
With criminal activity like this still a daily fact of life in the nation’s capital — and with Americans nationwide often uneasy about their families’ public safety — Democrats are playing political Russian roulette by citing encouraging crime statistics to declare President Donald Trump’s takeover of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department wholly unnecessary.
The same goes for his flooding of the city streets with National Guard troops and federal law enforcement. A not-insignificant portion of the electorate in crucial 2026 midterm election battlegrounds might conclude that at least Trump is doing something and acting within the law.
Yes, statistics prove crime is dropping, these same voters might acknowledge. But if conditions haven’t improved sufficiently to assuage voters’ concerns, then citing crime stats to insist nothing at all needs doing is liable to push voters toward Trump.
Similarly, just because FBI statistics released earlier this month showed the rate of murders, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies dropping across the U.S., that doesn’t mean that they reached levels voters find acceptable. It’s not unlike arguing to voters anxious about paying their bills that the economy is fine because the stock market is booming, unemployment is at historic lows and statistics show inflation is slowing.