WASHINGTON — Faced with the troubling prospect that crime in the nation's capital might continue to fall, Democratic leaders this week intensified their calls for President Donald Trump to withdraw National Guard troops and scale back the expanded federal law-enforcement presence in Washington, D.C., warning that the current trajectory is becoming politically unsustainable.
The intervention was launched after President Trump argued that extraordinary federal action was necessary to address violent crime in the city, a characterization that Democratic leaders and D.C. officials immediately disputed. They described the deployment as unnecessary, politically motivated, and a potential abuse of presidential authority, rejecting the notion that the capital was overwhelmed by crime.
Since the deployment, the administration has pointed to declines in reported crime as evidence that the crackdown is working, highlighting a period in which overall crime was reported to be down compared with the same period a year earlier, with especially large declines in categories such as homicide, robbery and assaults involving dangerous weapons.
That success has now become the central problem for its critics, according to the new satirical consensus emerging on Capitol Hill, where the continued decline is being treated not as a welcome development but as an urgent reason to end the policy responsible for claiming credit for it.
The complication, as noted by even nonpartisan observers, is that violent crime in Washington had already been declining substantially from earlier peaks before the troops arrived, a trend reflected in both local police statistics and federal data. That pre-existing decline has made it difficult to determine how much of the subsequent improvement can be legitimately attributed to the federal intervention, a nuance that has done little to slow the competing claims of credit.
Crime analysts have further cautioned against drawing strong conclusions from short-term changes in reported offenses, urging patience and methodological humility, advice that has been enthusiastically ignored by all sides in the fight over who deserves recognition for the improving conditions and whether the intervention was ever justified.
For now, opponents of the deployment say the only way to resolve the debate over effectiveness is to remove the troops immediately, before additional data can further confuse the question of whether the policy is working.