As President Trump made the case for militarizing the streets of Washington, he used pictures of “homegrown terrorists” to illustrate his point that crime in the nation’s capital was out of control.

“Look at these people here,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference last week, flipping through a handout from the White House containing five mug shots, all people of color.

“They will never be an asset to society,” he said. “I don’t care. I know we all want to say, ‘Oh, they’re going to be rehabbed.’ They’re not going to be rehabbed.”

The declaration provided a window into the president’s selective view of criminality and redemption. In his eyes, Capitol rioters, a triple murderer, two police officers involved in covering up the killing of a Black man, and an Israeli settler accused of extremist violence all deserve a second chance.

But the people accused of crimes in Washington are irredeemable.

Mr. Trump, himself a felon, has shown particular leniency to criminals he seems to identify with — people who are white or wealthy, or who he believes have been unfairly persecuted, or who rioted in his name on Jan. 6, 2021.

The White House defends the president’s actions, pointing to his criminal justice record from his first term, which included signing prison overhaul legislation aimed at rehabilitation and using his clemency powers to release many Black offenders who faced excessive punishments for nonviolent crimes.

But in his second term,Mr. Trump has seized on racial tensions to further his longstanding view that cities are hopelessly dirty, violent and menaced by criminals. In addition to the District of Columbia, Mr. Trump characterized other cities, which have Black, Democratic mayors, in incendiary terms.

Chicago, he said, was “very bad.” Baltimore and Oakland were “so far gone.”

“When you look at what he’s doing, it’s very much selective criminality,” said Carl W. Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. “A lot of this is the ongoing racialization of crime. It’s not an accident that all the cities he’s thinking about targeting have either immigrants or they have Black mayors. It’s just so obvious.”

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that the president and his administration were not “cherry-picking” criminals to expose, including the ones featured in the handout, but rather were addressing a reality in the Black community.

Washington does have a real crime problem, although Mr. Trump has used exaggerated and inaccurate figures to portray the city as lawless.

“The people most impacted by crime in the inner-city happen to be Black and unfortunately, the people that are perpetuating the crime also happen to be Black,” Mr. Fields said. He also argued that comparing the treatment of Jan. 6 criminals with the treatment of others was unfair.

“Jan. 6 was one day in American history,” he said. “The crime plaguing D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, all these other cities, is every single day for these people. And it’s such a disservice to the feelings of these people every single day that feel like they cannot go to the local 7-11 out of fear of getting assaulted or murdered or carjacked.”

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has shown a pattern of characterizing defendants of color, in particular, as deserving the harshest punishments possible, while showing deference to others, including those who align more with his beliefs.

On his first day, Mr. Trump pardoned thousands of his supporters who were arrested and charged for taking part in a violent mob at the Capitol, assaulting the police, smashing windows, ransacking offices and threatening to hang his vice president. Some had prior criminal records, for offenses like rape, manslaughter and possession of child sexual abuse material, according to an investigation by NPR. “They’ve already been in jail for a long time,” the president said. “These people have been destroyed.”

Two days later, he pardoned Washington police officers who were convicted on charges related to a car chase that killed a young Black man in 2020, that they later tried to cover up. Mr. Trump suggested the officers were the victims in the case, and falsely claimed that the man was an illegal immigrant. “And I guess something happened where something went wrong, and they arrested the two officers and put them in jail for going after a criminal,” he said.

Mr. Trump also removed penalties against an Israeli settler with a history of violence, calling the sanctions “deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal and radical practices.” The settler is now accused of killing a well-known Palestinian activist whose work was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.”

The administration negotiated the release of a man who had been convicted of killing three people from a Venezuelan prison, even as the president ramped up his campaign to deport immigrants in the name of public safety.

And when he pardoned a former sheriff from Virginia — a vocal supporter of his — who was convicted of selling deputy positions in his department, Mr. Trump called him a “victim of an overzealous Biden Department of Justice, and doesn’t deserve to spend a single day in jail.” Instead, the president proclaimed, he would “have a wonderful and productive life.”

For years, Mr. Trump has invoked race when discussing crime.

Mr. Trump famously took out newspaper advertisements in 1989, including in The New York Times, calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty after five Black and Latino teenagers were arrested and later wrongfully convicted of the rape of a white woman. Even after the men, known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated, Mr. Trump never apologized or acknowledged their innocence.

That he was inspired to take action after a white 19-year-old who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency was assaulted this month crystallized the point that Mr. Trump also seems to only care about some victims, critics say.

Mr. Fields noted that the president also referred to Black victims during the announcement, and that he had spoken out against white perpetrators. He disputed that Mr. Trump was spurred into action by the DOGE employee, even though he decried the attack on social media and repeatedly mentioned it in public. Mr. Fields said the president was moved to act after Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington and a former Fox News host, showed him images of Black teenagers who had been killed.

“The president saw this for himself,” Mr. Fields said. “He does not want to see anyone dying or being assaulted on our streets.”

But the administration has not pursued justice for victims equally either.

The Justice Department paid nearly $5 million to settle a wrongful-death suit brought by the family of a Jan. 6 rioter, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by the police while trying to breach a barricaded door by the House chamber. Mr. Trump called the Black officer, who was found to have been justified in the shooting, a “thug.”

Two months later, the agency asked a federal judge to sentence a white police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor to only one day in prison. Ms. Taylor, a Black, 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot in her own home after the police executed a botched raid on her apartment.

Inimai Chettiar, a longtime criminal justice advocate who supported Mr. Trump’s prison reform agenda, said that the president’s actions in Washington reflected a common dynamic in tough-on-crime tactics that often target Black and brown communities.

“I think that this is a typical pattern that politicians, especially white politicians, fall into,” she said. “They view certain people as deserving and others as not.”

But she said sending the National Guard to the streets of Washington was excessive. “The Trump administration is trying to manufacture a domestic enemy in Black and brown people,” she said.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.