But that press conference was really it. Democrats did not hold other major events on the takeover, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did not mention it in their planned remarks during their own weekly press conferences. Jeffries only addressed the issue after reporters brought it up.
By and large, Democrats have struggled to message against the takeover, which Trump can maintain until Congress has to reauthorize it next week. Such weak resistance has shown Democrats’ political vulnerability on the issue—wanting to push back against Trump’s use of the National Guard to address crime, but also having to deal with the inconvenient fact that blue cities historically have a problem with crime—and seems to have made it easier for Trump to act on his stated desire to send federal troops into other blue cities such as New York and Chicago.
Norton’s line that crime in D.C. was historically low before the takeover was prevalent among early criticisms of the deployment. Many Democrats, including Schumer and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, downplayed crime in the district when Trump first announced the move. In a press conference following Trump’s announcement on August 11, Bowser acknowledged that the district experienced a crime spike in 2023 but argued that it had decreased dramatically since then. “Crime isn’t just down from 2023, it’s also down from 2019 before the pandemic, and we’re at a 30-year violent crime low,” she said.
Schumer went even further in an interview on August 13. “I walk around all the time,” he said. “I wake up early in the morning sometimes and take a nice walk as the sun is rising around some of the Capitol and the other monuments and things, and I feel perfectly safe. They’re full of it.”
Crime is indeed down in Washington compared to 2023, but that isn’t saying much. Though it’s better than two years ago, the district’s homicide rate this year is still much higher than that of other major cities in the United States. From the beginning of the year to August 12, Trump’s first full day of control over policing, D.C. saw 100 homicides (down from 112 in the same period in 2024), a rate of just over 14 per 100,000. Meanwhile, Chicago had a homicide rate of 8.5 per 100,000 for the same period, similar to that of New Orleans, which was just under 8. New York’s exact data for that specific time period is not available, but based on its weekly murder rate, its total murder rate for that time would be a little over 2 per 100,000.
“Yes, crime is going down overall, but we hadn’t solved the issue,” Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, told TMD. Johnson noted that despite the broad decrease, specific communities and pockets of the capital are experiencing an increase. “Oftentimes, a lot of researchers, statisticians, and leaders [will say,] ‘Oh, the data says this, the city-wide data,’ and act like people are delusional about what they’re experiencing,” he said. “But I think if you go dig deeper in the data, you can start to find some evidence why people may be still afraid of crime, even though the overall levels are lower than [they] were several years back.”
And it’s also hard to argue with the results. D.C. was seeing about three homicides per week this year before Trump took over. In the just over three weeks since Trump deployed the national guard, the district has only seen four homicides.
Some Democrats have acknowledged the decrease in crime while still objecting to Trump’s overall efforts.
Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and represents part of Detroit, told TMD that crime must be addressed on a “more fundamental level” by tackling poverty and income inequality. “More police, more national guards—even military. Will that help cut down crime? Yeah,” he said. “But that’s not how it should be done. How it should be done is [by] creating opportunities, closing the large economic gap.”
Experts have previously told TMD that the Guard’s presence could have a twofold effect to deter crime. In the short term, their uniforms and arms could intimidate would-be criminals. In the long term, arresting and subsequently incarcerating offenders would prevent them from committing more crimes in the future. (To learn more about the effect the National Guard is having on D.C., read the August 21 edition of TMD.)
Leading the Wednesday press conference was Rep. Delia Ramirez, who represents part of Chicago. She said Trump’s takeover of D.C. and threats to do so in other big cities were “about threatening diverse, successful, Democratic-led cities like Chicago that refuse to bow down to authoritarianism.” Another speaker, Rep. Nydia Velásquez of New York, implied that Trump’s crime crackdown was part of an effort to distract from his purported ties to Jeffrey Epstein. “He knows that what is in the mind of the American people is about releasing the Epstein files,” she said.
Other Democrats, however, are making more measured criticisms of the Trump administration. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the Democratic answer to crime in D.C. includes increasing the number of police. He criticized the administration’s cuts in funding to local police across the country, such as the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, top source of criminal justice funding for states and cities.
He told TMD there could be “changes in criminal laws to make the penalties more effective and more judges and parole officers—providing essentially more resources to the system. I’ve long advocated it.”
Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said Democrats should lean on federalism to argue against the takeover. “We need to show how we’re trying to empower local leaders,” he told TMD. “We’re trying to empower local law enforcement. That’s first and foremost. The idea that we need to come from the federal level down—it’s an imposition of the federal government, something that the Republicans have often lambasted and been opposed to.”
Asked about the effects of the guardsmen’s presence on crime during his Tuesday afternoon press conference, Jeffries said he did not support an extension of the troops in D.C. by Congress and seemed to merge messaging from Blumenthal and Kim.
“I’m going to continue to personally support the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia,” he said. “I’m going to support the Chicago Police Department, the New York Police Department, and police officers who protect and serve all across the country. And if those local police departments conclude that they want some support from the federal government, then I support that effort by those local police departments to partner with the federal government. It’s as simple as that.”
