Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital has sparked backlash from Democrats
As Democrats cry racism over President Donald Trump’s efforts to fight crime in Washington, D.C., by taking control of the city’s police force, a poll from earlier this year resurfaced showing that black and low-income residents in the nation’s capital are “significantly more” concerned about crime than their white and higher-income neighbors.
The May Washington Post/Schar School poll, which asked Washingtonians how they would “describe the problem of crime in Washington, D.C.,” found “stark divides along lines of race and income in the poll.”
“Black residents and lower-income residents significantly more worried about crime than White residents and those with higher incomes,” the Washington Post reported based on the poll. “As they were last year, Black women are among the most concerned,” the Post report went on, “with 65 percent saying crime is a very or extremely serious issue, compared with 82 percent who said the same last year.”
The findings resurfaced as Democrats lashed out at Trump over his Monday announcement that he is mobilizing the National Guard in D.C. and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control to “reestablish law, order, and public safety” in the nation’s capital.
“This is nothing on its face but racism and subjugation,” Jamal Holtz, the president of D.C. Young Democrats, told the Grio. “You have Republicans who want to take power over a democratic city, and particularly take power over a democratic Black-led city with majority Black and brown people.”
D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser (D.) slammed Trump’s announcement as “unsettling and unprecedented,” while the mayor’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb (D.), called the actions “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful,” insisting that “there is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia.”
While crime in the district has fallen since last year, when the city council reversed its stance on criminal justice reform and passed a tough-on-crime bill, the district has long struggled with high rates of violent crime and saw spikes as recently as 2023, with homicides up 35 percent, robberies up 67 percent, and carjackings up 82 percent that year.
On Monday evening, a shooting left one person critically injured near where liberal activists were protesting against Trump’s efforts to combat crime, according to reports by Fox 5 News and the X account DMV News Live.
Days before his Monday announcement, Trump ordered federal law enforcement officers to patrol D.C.’s “high traffic tourist areas and other known hotspots” for at least a week. The president has also threatened to put the entire District of Columbia under federal control, as the Constitution permits, after a mob of young assailants brutally beat up a former Department of Government Efficiency employee during an attempted hijacking.
Trump on Monday said his actions will “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor,” declaring, “This is Liberation Day in D.C. And we’re going to take our capital back.”
