Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund warned Breitbart News Daily that Washington D.C.’s homicide rate is "five to six times that of any other major city in the United States."
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he plans to deploy approximately 800 National Guard troops and assume oversight of the Metropolitan Police Department to tackle rising crime in Washington, D.C.
The announcement caused shockwaves across the media, with some critics arguing that increased concern about crime is based on a faulty perception of America’s cities. Meanwhile, others, like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, hinted that there may be some truth to Trump saying there is a crisis.
Sund praised Trump in particular for being a "very, very detail-oriented person," to the point he notices potential issues with the capital during rides in the motorcade.
"In case people don’t know that, it is not uncommon for him to be driving in a motorcade and realize, hey, street lights are out, or look at that or look at that graffiti and make a notification on it. That is how detail-oriented this President is. So for him to see some of the crime that’s happening and some of the assaults that are occurring — and Navy Yard is just six blocks south of the Capitol, a short distance from the White House. It’s a big area," Sund said.
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U.S. Park Police and ATF officers patrolled Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025. (ATF Washington)
"To see these gangs of youth kind of taking it over, it doesn’t surprise me that they’re now going to pull these federal resources together and form… [a] task force," Sund said of Trump’s new initiative.
But what has been stopped before can be stopped again, and Sund argued that Trump’s methods have indeed been tested in recent history.
"We did this in the early ’90s, when I was with D.C. police, we were able to drive down homicide rates. When Chief Lanier was chief, think about 2010 to 2014, we had a homicide rate that was maybe right around 100, 170 a year," he said. "Now 2023, you got 274 homicides. So you had a significant increase."
The rise in crime in America’s capital city is something noticed by commentators across the political spectrum, but many Democrats continue to downplay it, claiming it is actually at a 30-year low.
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US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025 (Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"So when people talk about, ‘Oh, there’s a big drop,’ there’s a drop from 2023 to 2024, but it’s still significant — double what we had in around 2010," Sund pointed out, noting the nuance that there "used to be a time the crime really stayed in certain neighborhoods."
Other former members of law enforcement have sounded the alarm as well.
"You have less chance of being victimized, but if you are victimized, you have more of a chance of dying," John Jay adjunct lecturer Jillian Snider, a retired New York Police Department officer, told Fox News Digital Tuesday of violent crime trends in the nation's capital.
Despite being the nation's capital, where many of America's most famous public figures go to work, the capital remains one of the most dangerous cities in the country. ((Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images))
Snider was referring to a report published by the Council on Criminal Justice in July, which studied violent crime data of 17 large U.S. cities between 2018 and 2024, specifically diving into the lethality of violent crimes in those cities.
It found Washington, D.C., had the highest lethality level out of the group — which included cities such as Baltimore and Chicago — at a 38% increase in lethality in 2024 compared with 2018.
Fox News' Emma Colton contributed to this report.