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Is crime up or down in Washington, D.C.?

That’s one of those eternal questions that’s back in the news this week as Donald Trump cracks down on crime in the capital city. From The New York Times’ news section:

Live Update: Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

President Trump said that he was temporarily taking control of the Washington, D.C., police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to the city, painting a dystopian picture of the nation’s capital that stood in sharp contrast to official figures showing violent crime in the city is at a 30-year low.

Okay, is crime up or down in Washington, D.C.?

That question seems to baffle a lot of people. But, obviously, it depends upon which crimes you focus upon, how reliable the Official Figures are, and over what time span you measure.

“Since 2018, D.C. blacks have died by homicide 97 times more often per capita than D.C. whites, one of the most bizarre social statistics in modern America.”

I tend to concentrate upon homicides because dead bodies demand honest bureaucratic attention, whereas who knows how valid are, say, shoplifting statistics from one city to the next and one year to the next?

I frequently focus on the CDC’s WONDER mortality database. Its count of homicide victimizations by race isn’t yet terribly politicized, in part because few pundits other than me look at it. It has its flaws, but, in general, the funeral and medical industries are better at filling out their paperwork than the law enforcement profession.

The CDC numbers report solely on homicide victims rather than murder offenders. Nonlethal crimes are not counted in the CDC’s mortality database, nor is any attempt to estimate the race of perpetrators. But it’s likely that most homicides are intra-racial, especially in D.C., where only one or two whites are murdered per year, so homicide victimizations by race are no doubt pretty close to perpetrations by race.

On the other hand, while murder is the big one among crimes, minor crimes like shoplifting tend to be annoying to the general public.

These days, homicides are remarkably concentrated among underclass blacks shooting each other, especially in the nation’s capital where the white population is particularly affluent and segregated from the black population. Extremely few white D.C. residents work in service jobs like, for instance, 7-Eleven clerk, where they might be murdered by stickup men. (Despite, or because of, D.C.’s de facto apartheid, it’s hilariously liberal: Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90–6 in Washington.)

Hence, from 1999 through 2024, 94 percent of homicide victims in Washington, D.C., have been black. During the seven years from 2018 through 2024, only eleven non-Hispanic whites died by homicide in D.C. compared with 1,241 blacks.

In D.C., blacks used to be much more numerous than whites, but as murder has been reduced since the Marion Barry era (1979–1998), gentrifying non-Hispanic whites have almost caught up with blacks in population size. Although gentrification is enormously publicized, Washington, D.C., is perhaps the only significant case of non-Hispanic whites displacing a sizable number of African-Americans. In most other cities, gentrification is a slow double bank-shot process with desperate Latinos first driving out blacks, and then whites gradually displacing Latinos.

Since 2018, D.C. blacks have died by homicide 97 times more often per capita than D.C. whites, one of the most bizarre social statistics in modern America.

Progressives have been emphasizing how crime has been falling lately in order to escape blame for the enormous increase in violence during the disastrous Black Lives Matter era. (Presumably, conservatives will soon start pointing out how sharply crime has fallen since Trump was elected last November.)

For example, lately liberals wanting to prove that crime is down almost always pick a starting year in the early 1990s when the Crack Wars were at their worst.

If you start with 2023, homicides are way down in D.C.:

Or they’ll choose 2021 at the peak of the George Floyd Racial Reckoning (a.k.a. the Pandemic Murder Spike).

And yet, 2023 was the worst year for homicides in D.C. since 1997, more than a quarter of a century ago.

Conservatives aren’t as clever about manipulating data to show crime going up, but if they were, they would start with, say, 1963 (everything really did change on 11/22/1963) or 1984 (a surprisingly non-dystopian year) or 2014 (the last year before Black Lives Matter became an obsession of the Establishment). For example, D.C.’s recent homicide rate looks really bad if you start with 2012–2014:

In contrast, I usually use one of two starting points: either 2018, which is the first year for which weekly data is available from the CDC, or 1999, which is the first year in which Hispanics were broken out by the CDC:

Homicides in D.C. dropped by 64 percent from 2002 through 2012 during the gentrification boom, as the non-Hispanic white share of the population grew from 28 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2020.

The CDC made some minor race/ethnicity changes in 2018, such as Pacific Islanders being broken out separately from Asians, but that’s not very important for looking at homicide data. Still, it requires a two-stage process to glue together data from 1999 to 2024, so I sometimes skip that.

One thing that happened in D.C. in the good old days of the early 2000s was that after 9/11 in 2001, practically every federal agency demanded its own armed security force, just in case Osama bin Laden came gunning for, say, the Fish and Wildlife department. So the office part of D.C. filled up with uniformed men, which local lowlifes found discouraging.

Then came the Great Awokening, which was particularly lethal in nearby Baltimore from the Freddie Gray riot of April 2015 onward. I wouldn’t be surprised if criminals spilled over from Baltimore to Washington. E.g., “D’Quarvious, my dear son, I don’t like you running the streets of Baltimore the way things are these days. I’ve arranged for you to go stay with your aunt in D.C.”

I like both 1999 and 2018 as starting-point years because they are pretty random.

Data from 1968 to 1998 is available, but Hispanics aren’t broken out:

Unfortunately, the CDC doesn’t have pre-1968 data. But a different source says that D.C. murders tripled from the early 1960s to 1968, before exploding in 1969.

So when people talk about crime being up, they sometimes mean from before the civil rights era, which is embarrassing for all concerned.

Trump probably has the wind at his back for cutting crime in D.C., but that’s a smart thing.

What you want to do is what the NYPD accomplished during the Giuliani-Bloomberg era when they changed the culture of criminals from carrying illegal handguns for fear of other crooks to leaving their guns at home for fear of the cops. Probably nobody could have pulled this off during the rise of crack in the late 1980s, but once crack was over-the-hill, it proved possible for Mayor Mike Bloomberg to oversee a steady fall in New York’s murder rate to levels not seen since Joe DiMaggio played for the Yankees.

A number of Northeastern cities besides New York, such as Boston and Providence, seem to have engineered similar shifts toward a much less shooty culture. In contrast, mid-Atlantic cities like Baltimore, D.C., and Philadelphia were exceptionally murderous during the Great Awokening.

But now things seem to be moving in the right direction, so giving them a harder shove toward law-abidingness may pay off.