chiffre013 days ago
Can't wait for the to have no impact on crime in Southeast.
Let's hope it doesn't have the same effect (ie the eventual fall of the republic)
[1] No military weapons were allowed inside this boundary of ancient Rome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomerium
Is that any better than people with a conscience staying and reluctantly following much worse orders in due time? At least when they leave, they send a message of resistance instead of silently capitulating.
That said, obviously the point of remaining is so that they can refuse those worse orders when they come, so that they can convince their peers to do the same or temper their actions, so that the administration needs to worry about pushing too far lest that wave of resignations comes at a critical moment. Alarming though the pattern may be, this is neither a clear cut violation of the constitution nor likely to be a major turning point in the administration's public support. Leaving now would be ineffectual - there is no plan in place to take advantage of a few resignations to put a serious damper on the current plans, nor will it stop what's to come. The people who resign now may feel good about themselves, maybe enough to justify the potential hardship they and their loved ones will suffer as a consequence, but they deny the rest of us a key resource. Resigning is a weapon that can only be fired once; it would be selfish and stupid to waste the shot.
They've been cooking the books on it.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander-suspended-crime-statistics/3959566/
Aside, this is a pretty useful comment, unlike your other one on this thread. More of this and less of that, please.
Might not the people of DC deserve better? Is it possible that problems exist in real life outside of "media attention"?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
Sorting by Total here looks like #25 in violent crime and #29 in property crime.
It's illustrative to compare against famously poorly-run countries. What are you trying to illustrate here by pointing out that DC is a city?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story?id=124406722
If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess?
https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-city/
St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k.
St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues.
https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-lawsuit-924491849641549828c4f52a41d54e6b
Pretty sure that doesn't apply in LA in 2025.
It's now winding its way through the appeals process.
Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
St. Louis situation is absolutely abysmal. 20 is way too high, 69 is way too high. These are 3rd world numbers that are absolutely inexcusable. And we're only talking about murders here, if you look into other violent crime data, it's also substantial for D.C.
The FBI frequently gets involved in murder cases all over the country, there are field offices everywhere. States are significantly different things than the special federal District of Columbia. There, it is generally up to the Governor to deploy the national guard, although plenty of exceptions and precedents exist for the President to do so.
Widespread poverty and guns.
The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
That’s a bridge too far for me.
Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1].
Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human.
You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
Maybe I missed something.
We can reasonably anticipate these programs will be shuttered for at least another year, if not another decade (or permanently). We can argue here or there about the exact numbers, but it's a waste of everyone's time so I just provided a generous range instead.
At the end of the day... what exactly do you think the billions of dollars of food and drugs sent to unfathomably poor areas were doing if not keeping a huge number of people alive?
I may have said in another comment, that I was actually against most of these cuts. Those programs (like PEPFAR). I actually worked with USAID 20 years ago teaching programming classes in Romania and Serbia, and not once did anyone I encountered have a single cynical view on anything. We were all just working hard to "teach a man to fish". So I know that these types of programs play a huge part in showing the world that we actually walk the walk in wanting a better world.
I still can't get behind the idea of wishing violence for policy changes. Maybe that's a core principle of mine. It feels anti-American, since we (historically) try to rise above that, even if we often fail.
The nature of policy changes at such high levels is that many decisions are going to result in people dying (think of geopolitical decisions, think of Syria, the famine in Sudan right now, etc).
And while this administration has definitely been more damaging than the past administrations, my reaction is to argue till our faces are blue whether it was a bad policy decision or not, rather than wish violence.
As a self-aware reductio ad absurdum, you ought to agree that violence in response to a policy of rounding up a certain ethnic group and murdering them en masse would be justified or at least in the realm of "not regrettable?"
And yes, I agree that many policy decisions can result in people dying. The moral valence of each one depends on the costs and benefits and the efforts undertaken to minimize the former and maximize the latter. And the intent is a factor too. Killing someone after a period of community deliberation for killing a child is a very different moral event than killing someone for fun.
In this particular instance, the cost/benefit analysis comes out to many people's calculation outrageously weighted to the cost side, and it is demonstrably the case that zero effort was put into minimizing those costs. This was also all knowable from Big Balls' position given that he knows how to use the Internet and could gain access to any expert in the world to more fully understand what he was doing. So he holds a lot of moral culpability (which does not imply carjacking him is a good way to deal justice, to be clear).
I will take my own advice on “intent matters” - and there’s been little care intent wise shown to actually study the impacts of these cuts. Which does make them feel more malicious.
All I did was give a short reply and a link to a news source.
Maybe you should talk to someone about your persecution fetish?
It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.
Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.
Article including the photo I'm describing: https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story?id=124406722
> Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion.
The story is that he pushed her into the car first then faced the carjackers.
No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.
In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-washington-dc-crime-eric-tarpinian-jachym/
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-crime-data-federal-takeover/ - August 10th, 2025
Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low - January 3rd, 2025 (My note: Published by this admin's DoJ in January of this year)
DC Metro Police 2025 Year-to-Date Crime Comparison - https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.
On the basis of his behaviour in courts, I recon there's a common cause for performative behaviour and him being a convicted criminal, rather than it being an instrumental behaviour intended to distract. He doesn't behave as if he has a mental model for the difference between "I did a bad thing and should be ashamed" vs. "I am having power struggle and must fight dirty", nor any concept of a lie beyond observing that "liar" is an insult.
This isn't really an improvement, and other people may be playing him in this way for their own power games.
Put differently, DEI is when you have double standards based on race. Colleges do think test scores = merit, because that’s the primary criterion for selecting among within the group of whites/asians. It’s DEI when they use other factors to try and achieve desired racial balancing.
I agree that quotas are certainly bad in principle, and many times in practice, but I have seen no credible claim where the status quo is a meritocracy, leading to the blatant showing in the current admin.
2) Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous (or any previous) administration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
[2] https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-recent-anti-dei-rhetoric-is-bad
DEI in practice means racial preferences and quotas. That’s why the term arose around the same time as a renewed push for explicit racial quotas: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/01/12/fifth-circuit-vacates-secs-approval-of-nasdaq-board-diversity-rules/
> and in an ideal world would be unnecessary
It’s not only unnecessary, it’s illegal. If you think historic discrimination had negative effects, just target the negative effects among all people similarly situated.
> Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous administration
Aggressively pursuing the President’s agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Political appointees are just that—political. The relevant standard of merit isn’t who is the best nerd, but who will best carry out the agenda the President campaigned on. The whole point is that voters can change the direction of the executive branch through electing the President, who in turn appoints like-minded cabinet secretaries.
Do you believe political agenda to be a suitable merit here as opposed to education and field work?
Here, “education and field work” matter only to the extent voters care about those things. Obama voters cared about those things, so Obama appointing the best nerds is consistent with the constitutional design. But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”
In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history. He campaigned with Trump talking about his kooky ideas and then people voted for the ticket. People voted for the guy who promised to do something different because they had lost faith in the nerds. The whole point of the constitution is for people to be able to do that. Trump moreso than any recent President got on stage with the people who was going to help run the country if you voted for him. That’s the constitutional design! That’s democracy!
No one has argued differently. My argument stemmed only from your, to me previously unfamiliar, definition of merit.
> But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”
> In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history
I take this to mean we agree that the current cabinet is the polar opposite of the previously historically stable definition of meritorious, but are wholly merited appointments under your clarified definition.
Though to be nit-picky, RFK Jr would not be the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history, but rather ranked based on either voting results or approval rating as merit is then simply a function of the elected representative appointing them.
What distinction would you make between the terms democracy and meritocracy? Are they functionally the same under your definition of merit?
I don't think I'm using "merit" in an unusual way. I think you'd agree that the specific criteria that constitutes "merit" depends on the nature of the job. You use different criteria for NFL players versus college professors.
I think the problem is that we're talking about political appointees, which because of the nature of democracy are very different from other kinds of jobs. In the political context, "merit" is a meta concept that depends on what the voters prioritize. In some contexts, voters want a traditionally credentialed person. This is true even in the Trump administration: Scott Bessent is a Yale graduate hedge fund manager. But in other areas, Trump voters have grown to distrust the institutions, like the medical establishment and the intelligence services, and "merit" in that context means someone that will upend those agencies.
The only thing the Trump appointees (including the supreme court ones) have been phenomenally effective at is deconstructing the USA. And they're not done yet.
I beg to differ mostly. The criminal justice system is heavily staffed by people of all colors and ethnicities, including many, many blacks, who in some cities predominate among the police (and general population, at least in some neighborhoods). Despite this, it's often just as bad towards civilians and minority civilians as a mostly-white police force.
More specifically, the criminal justice system is classist, and that minorities are often part of the poor and underclass in many cities makes them much more targets than their coincidental skin color, though it sometimes seems to serve as a useful visual marker for police to who it's easier to target on sight. The idea of so many police officers and other law enforcement officials who are themselves black or some other visibly non-white ethnic group nonethless targeting civilians who are of the same color, for race reasons, doesn't really make sense from a racism perspective, but it does make sense from a class perspective.
Racism and classism feed each other. We've known that since even before the civil war. Claiming classism doesn't make racism - poof - disappear. It actually reinforces it.
Spreading the net a bit wider, you can also look at the recent and massive ICE crackdowns on illegal migrants (and sometimes US citizens along the way). Just by looking at photos of these incidents, you quickly note that many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc, enforcing draconian crackdowns against other visible minorities. That's not simply something you can label under racism and be done with defining it. Other systemic factors are at work there.
That's because there's two types of racism: individual, and systemic or institutional.
Individual racism is the low-brow obvious type of stuff. Slurs, clutching your handbag walking next to a black person, that type of thing.
Institutional or systemic racism is more abstract, but also much more harmful as a whole.
Take, for example, the DEA. Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug despite not being nearly as harmful as even most schedule 3 drugs. That's not a coincidence.
That reflects the widespread institutional racism of the DEA. Marijuana was chosen to be scheduled 1 because of its association with black Americans, deliberating inflicting more widespread harm onto them.
Okay, so why does this matter? Because within racist institutions, you yourself are forced to be racist. Even just existing in the institution is an act of racism, similarly to how working for a military contractor is itself an act of support of War.
These institutions have a culture and set of expectations and rules, and to exist within them you must comply.
For example, you cannot be a police officer and simply choose not to criminal marijuana and instead criminal white drugs like cocaine. You have rules, and you must follow them.
You being black does not override that. You being Asian doesn't override that.
So, the big picture. ICE, as an institution, is racist and has goals to particularly harm specific racial minorites. It mobilizes on these goals via its policy, it's expectations, and even it's culture.
Being a brown ICE worker does not detect from those goals, and just by existing in ICE and doing their bidding you are implicitly racist. Because the institution is racist, and you support it. And their goals are racist, and you're a big part of making their goals a reality.
As a side note, this is also why "I have a black friend" arguments don't work. That's a refutation of individual racism, not institutional racism.
For more examples of systemic racism throughout US history, please see: redlining, gerrymandering, Jim Crow, segregation, the FBI, and the CIA
Alternatively, we could just make DC a state, which I'm broadly in favor of.
Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
Yes I would, the people of DC should have representation, but using retrocession to get there would dilute any influence they have on their own politics and local control. I understand that the founders were worried about fairness and no state being favored over another by selecting one to be the capitol of the country, but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today – especially if that state were made up out of whole cloth from the people who had already lived there.
On the contrary, it is a significant concern for me and I'm sure I'm not alone in my thoughts.
Fully half of the top ten richest counties in this country are suburbs of DC, a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying. I find this to be an absolute travesty that shows just how much incentive and corrupting force there is in the federal government.
Return the land to the states. Keep a small federal territorial enclave for actual federal buildings and functions. Make a lot more of these territorial enclaves all around this vast country so that power is less concentrated in one place. That's one thing the Germans got right, in their federalism.
Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)
It's in Arlington because... lobbying! Bezos wanted to absorb more defense spending in AWS and chose to be physically nearby to rub shoulders and get deals.
> us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
I doubt us-east-1 employs more than a handful of people. Datacenters are primarily hands-off. Bethesda supposedly has ~650 employees across 6 continents.
But I think you're missing the point: am I to understand that having datacenters and game developers in the area leads it to having the highest median household income in this fantastically wealthy country? Not New York with Wall Street, or Los Angeles through whose port the two largest economies in the world trade, or San Francisco with its own world-class port and all of its software industry?
Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
> Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
IMO it's perfectly legitimate for organizations to advocate for their interests as long as they do not engage in bribery. They often have subject matter expertise the government does not, and more information allows for better decision-making. Would you rather the government operate in a vacuum, completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of the country? Btw, it's not just corporations that lobby, there are plenty of NGOs doing the same thing.
If you want to blame someone for this dynamic, blame the founders of this country, who decided to create a federal district rather than put the capital in an existing city with an existing industrial base.
If anything were to happen it should probably be the creation of a "middle" Virginia on some sort of Northeast southwest line so that the metropolitan area is split among three states to dilute it.
Failing that just split it among VA/MD, that'd basically leave the status quo unchanged with regard to interests and power but at least make less people's lives subject to political football.
Now, I'm not a student of politics, so I may be making some error, but I'd say (1) only about 2/3 of the ones on that list* are in a decent political position, and (2) that in any event a shifting of the balance of power between states (not just US states, any states) and their corresponding federal government is a big deal and not to be done lightly.
Of course, because I'm not a student of politics, I also don't take any strong position about what the USA should or shouldn't do with DC. If y'all turn DC into Trump's personal walled castle and themed gold-plated golf course, all I'm gonna do is get some popcorn, I won't stop you.
* including e.g. the one I live in, where the president has far less power than in the American system and real power is with the chancellor, and also the voting system is completely different and supports a plurality of parties not just two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation
NL is kind of special: the capital of the country is Amsterdam, but the seat of government is the Hague. But in Belgium, which is about as divided as it comes, the seat of government is Brussels, which is itself bi-lingual.
I don't think this is a problem that requires a particularly convoluted solution. What it does require is for people to simply play by the rule of law. And that's the thing that the United States is currently putting to the test on every metric that matters.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
A good example of this is NYC around 2000. It worked.
Counterexample: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proactive-policing-crime-20170925-story.html
"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."
"“In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,” the researchers wrote. “The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.”"
"“Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of proactive policing can inspire additional crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police stops, summonses and so on,” the authors wrote."
NYC did indeed see a big crime drop in the 2000s… but so did everywhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Trend_of_Violent_Crime_from_1985_to_2022_(United_States).png
The same way a surveillance camera in every room would also reduce bad behavior...
If they're not, nothing will happen.
Costa Rica’s 17 in 100k is ~2.5 times bigger than the US’ 6 in 100k people killed by homicide.
Thanks to gun crime, the US’ homicide rates are at least 7x the rest of the first world, anglophone, countries where rates are sub 1 in 100k.
By that measure it is 2-3x more confronting, to move from the United Kingdom to the States than it is from the US to Costa Rica.
Except it's not "thanks to gun crime." Some of the states with the lowest homicide rates, like Idaho and Utah, have the most guns.
This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
You certainly have things like rural gangs, too, but if things are spread out you just don't have that critical mass to ramp the numbers up. This also plays out in other types of crimes – cars get stolen anywhere there are cars, but thieves are playing the odds and it's easier not to attract in a dense population while they'd stick out if they started going up some stranger's driveway in a place where there's no other traffic. When that Kia lock exploit was in the news, there were bored teenagers basically treating street parking as a shopping mall because the supply was huge and until they actually touched a car there was no crime in walking down a sidewalk.
The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.
Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
Crime rates are reported per 100,000 people, so population isn’t the reason.
While crime rates are per 100,000 people, population density makes a big difference because a low density, homogeneous population is going to have fewer interactions which turn negative. That's why people comparing crime stats usually compare cities or regions to avoid falsely reporting a correlation which is nothing more than a function of urban vs. rural density.
Retirement is a long way away. But next year, we have an Airbnb in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose that is safe. It’s a high rise condo 2/2 with a gym and a pool.
The murder rate in “Atlanta” is also still around 20 per 100,000 and I lived in various suburbs of metro Atlanta until 2022 and was never in fear of my life going into the city. But I also lived in a suburban enclaves there.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be one of these ignorant entitled Americans who refuse to learn Spanish. I am close to A2 level Spanish now and should be there by the time we go next year. I can hold simple conversations.
Why is grass height any of the government's business? Who voted for the people who did that? Who came up with the legal theories under which those laws exist? Why were these ever a justifiable pretense for the government to threaten people with force in the first place?
We all know the argument. It's some mumbo jumbo about mice and pests and public health, about blight and property values, and government interest in those things. But now the people (demographically, if not literally the same individuals in some cases) who were the ones peddling it are the ones threatened by it and it's made immediately clear to them how bullshit their justification was.
I feel like I'm the fucking goose chasing the guy in the down coat and I don't want to be.
Anything eventually involves the military shooting nukes at you.
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.
"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."
If you look at the actual list of homicides in a major American city, the victims are often people who are involved in the drug trade. Homicides are often highly concentrated in small areas. A large portion of the city sees no homicides at all in a given year. I don't know if an equivalent map exists for DC, but you can look at a map of homicides in Boston in 2024. There are a few areas where there are clusters with 2-3 homicides within a few blocks. Then there are whole neighborhoods where there are no homicides at all, or just one or two. https://www.universalhub.com/crime/murder/2024
Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
For decades now, the media has painted a sensationalized picture of big cities. I was traveling once and was talking to an older couple from a rural area. When I told them where I lived, they were genuinely concerned for my safety. I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.
> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?
[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.
I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.
And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.
The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.
What is out of touch is declaring that the crime problem, which is actually improving, is an emergency that justifies deploying troops to the streets of the capital. These troops are being deployed to the areas around the national mall where they are highly visible - but there is very little violent crime and a lot of existing police presence around the monuments. They aren't trained or experienced in street-level law enforcement. Neither are the FBI agents, who are being taken away from other critical priorities like counterintelligence to patrol the national mall. Note that Trump did not deploy the national guard on January 6th, when there was a genuine threat on the national mall. This is not a genuine effort to address crime. It is an extremely cynical effort to look like they are addressing crime while they grab more and more unchecked executive power.
Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.
Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.
[1] Here, I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C.
The GP elsewhere in the thread pointed out that in like-to-like comparisons of Washington, DC against peer world cities, it fares really poorly in violent crime.
> Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce
I doubt that the people who are committing crimes were disrupted from the workforce.
> DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's
Both things can be true: DC used to be worse in violent crime, and today's violent crime is still unacceptably high.
In particular for DC, note also that Republicans have blocked for many years efforts by DC's government to restrict the supply of guns and the lack of a national strategy means that someone who can't buy a gun in DC goes a few miles away to Virginia. In most other countries, you don't have the option of even a short walk offering access to very different laws. This also shows up in the crime stats: in my neighborhood there've been a couple of fatal shootings over the last decade – and in every case both the perp and victim were people from Maryland who came over the border to do a drug deal because they can switch jurisdictions in 5 minutes and thus confuse a police response.
Funnily enough, academic work suggests the exact opposite, that the homicide rate in this country could be 5x higher were it not for advancements in trauma care[0]. Inner-city hospitals are applying battlefield medicine techniques and saving lives, turning homicides into aggravated assaults.
> we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people
The state of West Virginia, which has more guns and a higher share of unhappy, economically marginalized young people than Virginia, has a lower homicide rate than its eastern neighbor.
Ultimately, we likely disagree on "the root cause of crime", as it were. I don't believe that more aid for the poor or reducing income inequality will materially reduce violent crime rates, because by and large people do not commit violent crime in order to escape poverty. Instead, people are poor for a lot of the same reasons that they commit crime: they have poor impulse control, high time preference, and little consideration for those around them. We have not yet figured out a way to apply money to people in such a way to change these undesirable behavioral patterns, so I am against spending more of the taxpayer's money in this fruitless endeavor. The ways that do work have fallen out of favor in society.
I believe what will make a material impact is lengthier sentences and more pretrial detention; that is, policy must favor the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of repeat criminals.
I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.
Objectively speaking, DC’s 27 homicides per 100k people in 2024 is almost double what it was in 2012. If actually started going back up before the pandemic. And in absolute terms, DC has about 8 times the homicide rate of a relatively safe american city like new york or san diego.
> If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk
It’s ultimately driven by gangs, but most people killed aren’t gang members per se. They’re gang adjacent, or siblings or friends who get caught up in the gang wars. Also, the gangs aggressively recruit young men in the neighborhoods where they operate. It’s very “you’re with us or against us.”
> go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches.
I’ve lived in downtown Baltimore, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. I know how cities work. But the violence is a constant for the people who live there. We got to know an Indian family who had a great Indian restaurant in the ghetto in Wilmington, which has a similar homicide rate to DC. Yeah, on any given day you won’t see someone get murdered. But they had someone get killed on the street outside their restaurant. And EMTs wouldn’t come for hours because they were worried about getting caught in a gang firefight. Then another person got shot in the street near my wife’s office at 5 am waiting for the Nike Store to open. That was just in one year. Imagine growing up there and not being rich each to isolate yourself from the violence.
It’s the opposite: there are a handful of small hotspots which are less safe, but even those aren’t that bad. I live in a fairly mixed neighborhood (none of my immediate neighbors are white, 20% of the ward earn less than $50k, etc.) and it’s just not something people are worried about in daily life.
There is a hotspot about ¾ mile away where we had a couple of gang members kill each other. That’s not great, of course, but it’s literally one building and behind closed doors (the police arrested the perps from Maryland last year, and it’s been quiet since). Nobody else in the neighborhood is changing their plans, local businesses aren’t affected, etc. If you go by in the evening, it’s people walking dogs and kids playing, not hiding inside with the doors locked.
Again, there are real problems and I wholly support the continued programs to solve them, but the imagery being used to claim an emergency is a work of fiction. If they wanted to do something about crime, they’d start taking cars away from unsafe drivers as that’s far more likely to be harmful to most residents here.
Every action taken by a police organization is per se a political action. That's why "police" are called that.
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
Unless you have personal political clout, this is True for any nation.
I also had bad luck when traveling to the US. Got detained by the CBP - I think because I accidentally sneezed on the officer and pissed him off. (Either that or I looked like some terrorist). Had to stay in a cell for more than a day. I wasn't even questioned!
Thankfully, nothing happened after that. Was good to catch up on sleep though, since there was nothing to do.
These are not good times for those who believe in liberal values. Waiting over a decade for the pendulum to swing back.
Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.
Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown. ^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
> Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1]
[1] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander-suspended-crime-statistics/3959566/
I think we ought to walk backwards from your question a bit. Is the position that the police are corrupt and abusive something that I'm supposed to disagree with? Is it supposed to be something obviously untrue (hint: it's not)?
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets.
However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does.
If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime?
Or will they continue to deny the tipping point?
At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets?
No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.
And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?
I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.
The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.
You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
And I remember that that was about focusing police on policing and spending more on having specialists provide social support and the kind of things that prevent crime, which cops aren't trained to do or any good at.
More than one.
>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?
More than once.
>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?
Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.
So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
All that stuff was 30-50 years ago. As I mentioned (and linked[0] to statistics), I'm old and things have changed a lot.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879420
Edit: Actually it was 35-50 years ago, but who's counting?
And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?
There was nothing clearly stating any dates or years.
Just like you did, I assumed what you said all happened in the past three weeks.
Especially since I said[0]:
"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge."
Because we grow up fast here in NYC. A month ago I was a child. Now I'm pushing 60. All in the past three weeks!
#Especially since I said[0]:
#"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several #attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the #Brooklyn Bridge."
That was for the robbery and before that you said:
#>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many #gun barrels have you stared down?
#More than one.
#>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just #standing there?
#More than once.
Nothing specific there. Why are you so antagonizing about it and trying to straw man something with my comment that doesn't exist? I only told you how I read (I'm probably not the only one) your comment and pointed out some context was missing and when you explained it, I accepted it.
Besides that, not believing someone is not an argument. On these issues, it means that you lack realistic perspective and have nothing to say.
Aside from what it makes you to discount someone's very real trauma, as your only patter.
As someone like you who has also been the victim of violent crime, I definitely do not want the military patroling any city. I hate violent crime, but that is not the way to solve it, period. It takes community policing and the slow process of raising people out of poverty, desperation and hopelessness, by undoing the damage that has been done to them through decades of economic oppression.
The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.
And this seems to be the incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_murders
Would you like to read that carefully?
https://mynorthwest.com/local/peaceful-protests-planned-in-seattle-for-george-floyd/1900080
https://projects.seattletimes.com/2020/local/protest-timeline/
https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/09/24/police-arrest-13-during-wednesday-night-protest/ https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/07/26/officer-injuries-precinct-damage-arrest-updates/
Should I not believe that people's post's here defending cities are from legitimate experience (at least as stated, in their bubbles)?
What happened to the "believe" people ethic?
I don't live in Oakland. What do you want me to read carefully, super-sleuth? To what purpose? In spite of your masterful rhetorical question, you're wrong about the event in question and location.
Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
You can't be good with nine months of nationwide riots and then ever think that you understand the impact or can get a handle on everything that occurred via zero-start google searches.
Not really. Maybe you just have really punchable face? Given the diarrhea you're spewing, those traits combined would probably make most people want to beat the crap out of you.
Which would explain quite a bit. Hey. Let's be careful out there![0]
All of these around 2021-2022-2023. We moved out of Seattle in 2023. Maybe these snecdotes are not a big deal for you. For me they are scary.
Where is this "broad support" coming from? The actual people living in Washington DC, or rural outsiders who have conjured up some picture in their minds of "crime infested cities?" If you did a poll of everyone in DC, would the majority be in favor of increased policing?
It always seems like the people who are most vocal about crime in big cities are always the people who don't live in or visit those big cities.
I live in NYC[0] and I'm old. It's never been safer in the many decades I've been alive.
And the police have little to do with that. They're just the biggest and best-armed gang.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City[1]
[1] In fact, NYC saw fewer murders in 2024 than any year since 1958 -- long before my parents ever met.
You questioning my experience and where I live isn't an argument.
In liberal circles, we "believe" people. Remember? Especially those with bad experiences.
You questioning me just means that you can't tolerate people with differing experiences having opinions and perspectives that are counter to your own.
What I said is factual.
You're a sheltered person with a false entitlement to an opinion on this specific matter.
I live in a major city between Boston and DC. I've implied enough of my experience to warrant telling you to shove your rude scare quotes up your a*.
I've also lived in NYC. I have family that still lives in NYC. Who was just punched in the face for the second time in a couple of years, walking home at night. And that's in "safe" lower Manhattan.
What does where you live have to do where I live?
Just like the "person who walks with cameras", the only thing that you are communicating is that you are privileged and awful on a couple of levels. One of which is having zero perspective and real experience living in an urban area that is outside of wealthier zones and, especially in poorer cities, is only barely managed by police. Bourgeoise bubble living does not entitle you to having a policy opinion on how the poorer areas of cities should be managed, what it's like living in them let alone growing up in them, and on how they are doing on the street level. "Relativity" aside.
If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tracker/. Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
Sadly, some of the malignant people around him are more cunning.
What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!
D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicides-carjackings-decline-dc-police-2024. In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).
This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate.
D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.
Philadelphia and Baltimore have a median income half that of DC. They’re among the poorest large cities in the country, while DC is one of the richest.
DC’s problem is that it’s run by people that are somehow dumber than Congress. A literal crackhead was mayor in the 1990s. I think Mayor Bowser is actually doing an excellent job,[1] but she’s the first good mayor the city has had in my lifetime, and everyone around her sucks.
[1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much. She’s not a Resistance type, and always says something like “well I don’t agree but we’ll do our best.” https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5446868-dc-crime-trump-intervention/ (“I’m going to work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster. Let me put it that way.”).
> [1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much.
I don't think you intended it but this reads as an admission that you primarily approve of her due to her seeming opinion of Dear Leader.
Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.
Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.
National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).
The DC is different and has a law that allows the federal government to do this. It’s unusual but not illegal and is a feature not a hack. corollary to a governar using both local police + NG
March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.
1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?
2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?
3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)
4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?
Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.
(Incidentally, I personally support the UN Resolution 181 for a 2-state solution, so I am against the position of the US government - whether Republicans or Democrats)
ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.
>then they left without incident
They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.
But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)
1. "both a test and a warning sign"
2. Evidence Trump has no intention of turning the country into a military dictatorship.
You choose the more exptreme interpretation (#1) instead of the obvious one (#2)?
When the military was deployed then peacefully left, you still viewed that as an increase in the risk of a military takeover?
Even though the troops were withdrawn?
I’m just trying to understanding this upside down world where when something doesn’t happen it’s proof it’s more likely to happen in the future.
The Marine entered AND LEFT Los Angelas. Russia never did that.
If you had said “while the Marines were deployed the risk is higher” it’s at least logical.
But the fact they left without incident yet you think it’s proof of the opposite outcome is hard to understand.
By my reckoning next stop would be an “accidental fire” in the House of Representatives.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-trumps-dc-deployment-order
It’s hard to imagine three summers from now being anything other than a hellscape. I hope to God I’m wrong.
What is this "blatantly illegal stuff" ?
If so, forgive me for not responding.
If you are not trolling, and well intentioned: why don't you go and read some of that main-stream-news that everybody loves to piss on these days and use that to get to at least a moderately up-to-date state of mind before engaging in threads like these. It would save a lot of time.
If you are of the mindset that you are in fact informed and that Trump's administration has not yet performed any acts that are blatantly illegal then you're entirely on your own, or at least, I would hope you are (unfortunately, you probably would not be).
AFAIK, the Trump Administration - as controversial as it may be - has not broken any Supreme Court rulings. Legal workarounds are not unique to this administration - such were done by the previous Biden administration as well. Please note the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s broad student loan forgiveness plan, ruling it exceeded the administration’s authority. Nevertheless, a workaround was found by using the Higher Education Act instead.
I see this as a perfect example of the US Supreme Court clarifying the scope and applicability of law - just like they rejected Biden's student loan forgiveness under the HEROES act and Biden found a workaround instead.
[0]: Not what is right or wrong, and obviously like any other human enterprise, they are capable of making mistakes.
> Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?
This is a weird and convoluted strawman, I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here, given your apparent stance on all this, did you maybe omit a negative in there?
The constitution is the supreme law of the land, so yes, by definition, they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not. Note that I explicitly pointed out that decisions on what is legal and what is not doesn't always line up with what is right and what is not. I'm not saying that the Supreme Court is some divine moral arbiter, just that under the laws that organize this country, there is no higher court that can tell it that it is wrong.
You're free to disagree with SCOTUS decisions. I disagree with quite a few myself. The justices don't even agree with each other a lot of the times[0]! But it would be good for the republic for people to not reach for the "SCOTUS is now clearly political!" jar every time they disagree with a decision or the makeup of the court, because your political opponents will feel the same way, as well.
> I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here
Let me clarify: you seemed quite worried that the Trump administration would defy SCOTUS rulings. My rebuttal was that lower court judges are already doing that, because of their opposition to some of what the administration is doing; that is, they are issuing rulings that clearly contravene prior SCOTUS rulings, in defiance of the law.
Prima facie, the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging in, and I find the apocalyptic talk about authoritarianism, fascism, or the end of democracy in the US very unpersuasive, not to mention unhelpful and unhealthy.
[0]: But perhaps not as often as you think: https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-courts-ideologically-split-rulings-occur-less-often-you-think-2106365
So ignoring court orders to quickly deport people happened before?
Could you show me an example where Biden ignored a court ruling, because i dont know any. Ill insta-upvote you, if you can show the occurrence numbers are roughly equal.
If you cant provide any example, i strongly suggest you reconsider your above statement about the end of democracy, or whether you would be willing to storm the capitol to defend it against trump.
1,168,021 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States
But — unlike the attempted coup which was totally his fault — I'm not sure you can blame even half of that death toll on Trump, given all the other countries that also did badly.
I'm not above blaming extremely powerful people for harmful abstract ideology. I'll do it.
China, I think, managed to get their response right (eventually, having failed hard right at the start). Either that or they managed to hide the death toll in several different dependent outputs that all roughly agree with these numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory#/media/File:COVID-19_Outbreak_World_Map_Total_Deaths_per_Capita.svg
(That said, this map also says that the USA should be ruled over by Canada, with King Charles as head of state etc., I absolutely do not disagree that a lot of dumb things were done and should've played out differently, this is just a relative statement about how incredibly mediocre a lot of our other leaders besides Trump are in the supposedly developed nations…)
Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.
It directs the executive agencies to seek to loosen any restrictions on non-consentual admission to psychiatric facilities and to force homeless (and people with mental illness) into them.
It also aims to end drug abuse recovery programs and says that not having physical space for patients shouldn't stop them, IIRC.
That's not the context that we are in politically or socially right now.
Why would you invest millions and years of your life into building a company if the administration can just decide to take your intellectual property [0] because you made them angry?
Why would you spend effort developing hardware and a domestic manufacturing process if the administration can just declare 100% tariffs on your critical components? Especially when your competitors can just pass off a little bribe and get special treatment: [1]
> Cook and Apple aren't walking away empty-handed. Companies that "are building in the United States," like Apple, won't be subject to a forthcoming 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, Trump said.
There is a reason you don't see world-changing companies arise from states with so much corruption. A free market requires neutral governance - no special treatment or favorites. With this new administration, the US market is looking much more skewed than in the past few decades, and that will have severe consequences for domestic innovation and research.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-donald-trump-gift-apple-tariffs-2025-8?op=1
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
A military deploying to the capital of the richest country on earth where most tech giants reside is important for tech.
Whereas extensively researched political articles like this one? Mum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816165
So, that's why I flag that stuff. I also think it's pretty absurd to think that HN censors opinions. I and others constantly criticize SV bigwigs like Marc Andreessen (can somebody ask ChatGPT how many goddamn 'e's are in his name, Jesus Christ) and Paul Graham, lots of tech-skeptic stuff gets posted here and makes it to the front page.
> As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing
We are too! The same way we decried the despicable genocidal actions Germany did on the Jewish population during WW2, we now decry the despicable genocidal actions of the state of Israel on the population of Palestine.
> (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"
Only one side is actually doing genocide at the moment, and that's Israel. Israel should stop the genocide and either engage in a war without war crimes, or better yet, stop annexing foreign territories and stop the war altogether. I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point, but there is only one side currently shooting at civilians at aid sites, stopping food from reaching the civilian population, and killing journalists.
Gaza is not a foreign territory. It is part of israel. Israel won it over the course of a series of wars that they won in the last century. Almost all of which were not started by the israelis. If the gazans wanted sovereignty they shouldnt have started and lost so many wars. Losing has consequences.
> there is only one side currently shooting at civilians
The only reason the gazans are not doing this is because they are utterly incompetent, they cant. I dont see how that gives them the moral high ground. As soon as they gain the ability to shoot israeli civilians they will begin to do so again.
Both sides are led by truly despicable governments, no one has any amount of moral high ground in this conflict imo.
using dehumanizing/racist language as a defense for war crimes unfortunately doesn't fly at The Hague.
you should ask Israelis if they feel like Oct 7 was a display of incompetence.
Oct 7 will never happen again because it shouldn't have been able to happen in the first place had Israel been less busy fomenting Palestinian extremism in Gaza, and beating/killing Palestinians in the West Bank.
There is no justification for the conditions in Gaza today. All I see are Israelis relishing in the suffering of another group of people. And I see Israeli extremists continuing to conflate Israeli Nationalism with Judaism, so that any criticism of Israel is called anti-Semitic.
I was about to make a joke about this to your sibling comment. Completely agree that oct 7 was one of the biggest security fuck ups in modern history, the militants never shouldve been allowed to escape gaza.
There is no defending Israel's actions over the last year. I just hate seeing people hitting the wrong points. The lopsided death count is irrelevant because it is Hamas' fault. The annexation of gaza is irrelevant because thats what happens when you lose a war you started.
Now starving them out and running them over Tiananmen square style, thats pretty relevant I think. Israels actions in the west bank were in many ways even worse until the starvation stuff started. Straight up state sanctioned terrorism happening over there
Nope, deliberately not saying this. I super don't care what the "whose fault is this" tally is. I'm only interested in saving lives and figuring out what's next.
The (awful) truth of this is there are no realistic good options. We're not invading, Israel won't allow UN peacekeepers in, surrounding Arab states can't challenge Israel militarily and/or don't want to aid the Palestinians, there is no political will in any country to send troops, and Israel doesn't actually need our support militarily or otherwise so we have no leverage anyway. So, either a given person's naive to this and they have reading to do, or they're aware and using the situation to further their own ends. Maybe that's anti-Semitic propaganda from some Muslim states (Iran). Maybe that's Russian (et al) disinformation ops driving political wedges into the Democratic Party. Maybe it's the DSA demagoguing the issue to (try to) win elections. Maybe that's committed anti-Semites carpeing those diems. All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.
Also I'm not Jewish! I do have family down the block from where Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was shot up though, plus a fair number of Jewish friends. Appreciate the sentiment though.
There are. Israel stopping the genocide and building settlements in foreign territories that don't belong to them is a realistic good option.
Do you have something against Israel stopping the genocide it does on Palestine? What's the difficulty to stop shooting people at aid sites and allowing humanitary aid to enter the country? Or is it very difficult to not snipe journalists and bomb hospitals?
> All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.
Lots of words, yeah war is terrible, yeah reprehensible acts on both sides, yeah the issue is complex. But here are simple facts:
Israel is committing a genocide to the Palestinian population at this very moment. Undeniable. It's not complex to not do genocide, many of us succeed in avoiding to do a genocide on a daily basis. Today I and many other people across the globe didn't participate in a genocide, for example!
AFAICT, from Peru's General Óscar Benavides:
There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!
Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.
If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intentional_homicide_rate
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. There are a handful of other American cities with worse crime, so we should give DC a pass?
Constitutionally it belongs to the federal government, which devolved some level of home rule to the local government starting about 50 years ago. The evidence seems clear that local authorities aren't doing the job well.
DC spent over $26k per resident, well above the overall US federal budget of roughly $20k per person. And the DC budget doesn't even have to account for a globe-spanning military!
What autonomy is it lacking that it can't put repeat violent offenders behind bars?
> When you take a look at the trend of the data over time it doesn't tell a story of crime that isn't being managed. It may not be as quick or as thorough, but it has been downward trending.
Outside of six whole years, the homicide rate in DC hasn't been under 20/100k in 50 years. "Downward trending" from 80 in 1990 to 20s now is great in isolation, but terrible when you realize that places like Paris and London are in the low single digits.
You keep citing the homicide rate but do not consider the geography and constraints of the capital region, i.e., some of the crime and violent offenders are from non-residents. You can't simply compare it to a city like London or Paris for many reasons.
Baltimore and Philly are worse, yes. That's little reprieve for the average Joe living in DC surrounded by disorder. DC, being exclusively federal territory, has the unique legal situation where the president could deploy the National Guard for policing.
> You keep citing the homicide rate but do not consider the geography and constraints of the capital region, i.e., some of the crime and violent offenders are from non-residents. You can't simply compare it to a city like London or Paris for many reasons.
I don't understand your line of reasoning. Do you care to clarify? Neither London, nor Paris, nor any other city in this country are islands where entry and exit are controlled. Some American cities with really bad crime, like St. Louis or Philly, abut state lines and likely get a lot of cross-state criminal traffic as well.
Fact is there are other "worthy" candidate cities to deploy NG to, to counter crime. Additionally, trump is unreliable and generally unfit as a POTUS. Given these two, the concern about trumps tendency to abuse of power, which he demonstrated already, is a very valid response to him mobilizing NG in the most sensitive political region.
You cant calm these concerns with comparably similar crime rates.
Ontop, isnt it an assumption, that NG can actually help with rampand crime? I imagine they project hard force on the streets but do not react to 911 calls.
Also, your budget justification was vague too. The total spending per capita does not allow any clues on relative spending on law enforcement. There must be a reason why its significantly higher and maybe thats why LE falls short too.
DC is unique among those cities because it is federal territory where the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction, according to the constitution. It's harder to deploy the National Guard to St. Louis, for example, because you also have to deal with the government of Missouri (and probably that of Illinois, too, since the metro area spans both states).
In fact, a senator famously called for troops to be deployed to those cities in the height of the unrest in 2020[0]. He was excoriated for it by his political opponents, and the editor in charge of the NYT opinion pages resigned over allowing that piece to be published. So there are people who would like to see dramatically stronger law enforcement everywhere, not just DC.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html
I am avoiding the argument regarding stronger law enforcement because there is a very little vague basis for it in this case. But legally speaking, it is within the letter of the law because there isn’t another option without triggering the Posse Comitius act.
And then last time anyone wanted him to deploy them in DC he apparently couldn’t because the mayor didn’t allow him to…
It’s got near zero to do with that.
Here is the list of the top-20 murder-rated cities in the US:
St. Louis, MO – Mayor Cara Spencer (DNC), DNC rule 76 years.
Baltimore, MD – Mayor Brandon Scott (DNC), DNC rule 56 years.
New Orleans, LA – Mayor LaToya Cantrell (DNC), DNC rule 153 years.
Detroit, MI – Mayor Mike Duggan (ex DNC), DNC rule 63 years
Cleveland, OH – Mayor Justin Bibb (DNC), DNC rule 35 years
Las Vegas, NV – Mayor Carolyn Goodman (Husband of ex-DNC mayor), DNC rule 82 years
Kansas City, MO – Mayor Quinton Lucas (DNC), DNC rule 34 years
Memphis, TN – Mayor Paul Young (DNC), DNC rule 53 years.
Newark, NJ – Mayor Ras Baraka (DNC), DNC rule 72 years.
Chicago, IL – Mayor Brandon Johnson (DNC), DNC rule 94 years.
Cincinnati, OH – Mayor Aftab Pureval (DNC), DNC rule 41 years
Philadelphia, PA – Mayor Cherelle Parker (DNC), DNC rule 74 years
Milwaukee, WI – Mayor Cavalier Johnson (DNC), DNC rule 65 years
Tulsa, OK – Mayor Monroe Nichols (DNC), only outlier in this list with significant non-DNC mayors
Pittsburgh, PA – Mayor Ed Gainey (DNC), DNC rule 91 years
Indianapolis, IN – Mayor Joe Hogsett (DNC), DNC rule 9 years.
Louisville, KY – Mayor Craig Greenberg (DNC), DNC rule 56 years
Oakland, CA – Mayor Sheng Thao (DNC), DNC rule 48 years
Washington, D.C. – Mayor Muriel Bowser (DNC), DNC rule 64 years
Atlanta, GA – Mayor Andre Dickens (DNC), DNC rule 164 years
You can read a million different things from a list of items with similar attributes. Especially one compiled without sources or any context of the regions of the US.
From there, it's not a great leap to think that places with a soft-on-crime attitude at the local level might engender more criminal activity than places with the opposite attitude. Similar to why there are so many homeless people in California: the weather is lovely and local attitudes are permissive to it compared to other places, so it sucks less to be homeless there than, say, North Dakota. I think it passes the smell test to suggest that it sucks less to be a violent criminal in Baltimore than, say, Carmel, Indiana.
> are cities with Democrat mayors much larger and diverse than Republic mayor cities
What are you implying about diversity?
I suspect big cities tend to have a larger underclass population and a larger wealthy class. Predictable results ensue: Democrat administrations, and higher crime rates.
That's hilarious. It is interesting that these memes are so persistent even in light of the present. No, Republicans are not 'hard on crime', they are hard on anybody that isn't a white, preferably wealthy, evangelical republican.
In reality, Trump gained in all minority populations between 2020 and 2024. He actually lost white Protestants, and white voters in general, in the same time period[0]. In income, too, poorer voters shifted more towards the Republican candidate, while the more well-off shifted more towards the Democratic candidate.
This has been a fascinating realignment in traditional partisan composition. You're probably right that historically the Republican Party has been hard on those who aren't white, rich, and religious; but over the past 10 years or so, it's actually the Democratic Party that is the party of the white, rich, and religious[1].
[1]: The new left-liberal dogma that comes in many names, but has a lot of overlap with traditional religion.
…To the point that they elected a convicted felon to the presidency.
This is not true at all. There are plenty of violent, hard on crime moderate Democrats that run these cities. Your bias and romanticization of politics is showing. Again in your comment the description is disingenuous and lacking sources and evidence.
You might want to research the US moderate political beliefs. Many are RINOs and DINOs which pokes a lot of holes in the current culture war. Especially if you spew bs such as, Rs are hard on crime and Ds are soft on crime.
> What are you implying about diversity?
What are you implying about it? I am implying that any time people of diverse cultures and beliefs are packed together in an area like a city, you probably end up with a higher murder rate situation than if those people weren’t packed together into a city. Yes?
It is: https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-city/
Edit: To be fair though, it is A list. I'm sure there are others as well, as the authors note, its hard to gather most recent data
So yes, your list is applying some sort of population threshold, which means you are then also just selecting for big cities.
St. Louis, MO (DNC rule 76 years): 29%
Baltimore, MD (DNC rule 56 years): 58%
New Orleans, LA (DNC rule 153 years): 29%
Detroit, MI (DNC rule 63 years): 17%
Cleveland, OH (DNC rule 35 years): 29%
Las Vegas, NV (DNC rule 82 years): ?? %
Kansas City, MO (DNC rule 34 years): 19%
Memphis, TN (DNC rule 53 years.): 23%
Newark, NJ (DNC rule 72 years.): 12%
Chicago, IL (DNC rule 94 years.): 35%
Cincinnati, OH ( DNC rule 41 years): 19%
Philadelphia, PA ( DNC rule 74 years): 18%
Milwaukee, WI ( DNC rule 65 years): 31%
Tulsa, OK (outlier): 26%
Pittsburgh, PA (DNC rule 91 years): 30%
Indianapolis, IN ( DNC rule 9 years.): 27%
Louisville, KY (DNC rule 56 years): ??%
Oakland, CA (DNC rule 48 years): 36%
Washington, D.C. ( DNC rule 64 years): ??%
Atlanta, GA (DNC rule 164 years): 25%
(for mayoral elections)
Multi-generational city rule and less than a third of voters showing up are not even abysmal data points – it's a gotham-style dystopia.
Maybe occasionally a Republican will slip in as mayor of San Diego or Miami, but 90% of the time even those cities are run by democrats.
So those people count less because they vote for the wrong guy?
Some apparently believe that because "cities are run by _democrats_" 164 years in charge is not a problem in itself. 164 years of continious ruling over a city, but of course the other side is the currupt threat to democracy. The mental gymnastics involved are olympic.
There simply aren’t many examples of what America’s economically vibrant cities would be like if the other side was in charge, but maybe vibrancy is just not compatible with conservative ideology, and the stick to the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas because they are more…conservative (places elect leaders that mesh with their values).
Trump just made himself owner of the crime rate in DC. Every crime that occurs there is now Trump's failure. That is not something that he's going to want.
And his base gobbles it up.
Heck, even it did get attributed to him - it doesn't matter. 47% of conservatives said they'd still support Trump even if he raped children with Epstein: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-47-republicans-still-130000101.html
Do you really think he will let out numbers that make him look bad
Is there anything to learn from that? Of course not. Aside from the liberty for security trade, should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
They have budgets in the Billions of dollars, tons of surveillance equipment, military grade weapons, and a monopoly on force. But they still can't deal with street thugs, belligerent crazy people, or jerks on the subway like cities in other countries manage to do?
I don't know what Trump's game is in all of this, but we should stop pretending that blue cities aren't already playing their own games and they clearly don't involve stopping or solving crime.
Criminology studies have shown that you in fact do not need a hyper-resourced police state to achieve this. The Pareto rule applies very strongly in criminality; the majority of violent crime is committed by a tiny fraction of the population[0]. About 90% of prisoners have been arrested more than three times[1].
You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country (a result of the common law tradition coming down from Blackstone) and the degree to which local policy in places like DC outright favors the rights of the criminals over the rights of the innocents that must live near them. There's a lot of room to improve the lives of the law-abiding before there are "snipers on every roof".
> should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
DC isn't just any town; it has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous. In 2024 alone, it had over 5000 cars stolen in a place that only has 350k cars. That's more than one in a hundred.
Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x, or try some other radical thing? Because this isn't working out.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/arrest-history-persons-admitted-state-prison-2009-and-2014
The US has almost 2 million people in prison. It has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet.
US - 541 per 100,000 Canada - 90 Germany - 68 Japan - 33
Doesn't seem like it's that hard to get a conviction. The US has a sociology problem, not a difficulty getting convictions problem.
> It has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous.
It has the 19th highest murder rate for US cities. It sits behind Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1/4 the rate of St. Louis, Missouri. Still a terrible murder rate, and it shouldn't be normalized, but there is utterly nothing exceptional about DC. And it's miles safer than virtually anywhere in methville, Appalachia.
As to car thefts, it sits at 61st among US cities, behind Nashville TN, Savannah GA, and Lexington, KY. Eh.
>Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x
In the ultra-low tax US of A? Har. Ignoring that its crime rate is not remotely exceptional relative to other cities, already the vast majority of US cities are barely solvent, and policing is already the most expensive line items for city budgets.
Should there be a massive restructuring of policing? Yes, absolutely. Should career criminals face fewer reprieves? Absolutely. Does the US have a catastrophic sociological probem? Absolutely.
Is this an easy fix that Big Brain Trump is going to solve? LOL, no, give me a break.
There are more people in prisons in America because more people commit crimes in America, compared to those other places. And more people commit crimes than are caught and convicted. If the US was in fact a police state, those incarceration rates would be even higher.
> there is utterly nothing exceptional about DC
The subject under discussion is Trump having the National Guard to perform law enforcement duties. DC is indeed exceptional in that it is the only jurisdiction where he could do that.
> it's miles safer than virtually anywhere in methville, Appalachia
Factually untrue. The state of West Virginia, the archetype of "Methville, Appalachia", has a lower homicide rate than its vastly richer neighbor Virginia (almost twice as high of a median household income).
> Should career criminals face fewer reprieves? Absolutely.
> Is this an easy fix that Big Brain Trump is going to solve? LOL, no, give me a break.
Given what we know of recidivism, Trump's brain does not need to be all that big to make a noticeable difference. In fact, you already touched upon the solution: just don't keep releasing multiple-times convicted violent criminals back into the population. A tiny fraction of the population is responsible for the majority of violent crimes. Just keep them away from the rest of society and you'll have made a big difference in the lives of the less well-off who, for the most part, have to live next to these people.
"The Act (Posse Comitatus Act) does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor."
Wiki Page on the Posse Comitatus Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_ActIt's never dropped of my news, from him moving Maxwell to a minimum security prison, to questions about whether he'll pardon her, to the signed letter with illustrations he wrote for Epstein's birthday.
I don't think the world will ever forget, certainly my social circles and social media are still buzzing with it.
In many ways it's more damning than watergate, though people are debating whether to call it Epsteingate or Pedogate.
https://ground.news/article/judge-rejects-unsealing-ghislaine-maxwell-grand-jury-transcripts
CNN has one story way below the fold on their homepage mentioning Epstein *for subscribers only.
The story is effectively dead. Whatever legs people thought this had are effectively gone except for the rabid progressives who just want anything they can to damage Trump…or the Qanon crowds. In my opinion, those two folks belong together and can enjoy their alignment, two ends of the horseshoe.
Revealing the epstein docs/list was a major selling point for the q-anon/conspiracy voters during the election. This is the first major controversy that puts trump against a sizable majority of his supporters, which are becoming disillusioned.
We are reaching a nixon-esque turning point where the cover up is worse than the crime.
I keep getting all these multiverses mixed up. Here I thought in this universe he was only found liable in a civil suit about sexual harassment, not convicted in a criminal court for a sexual crime.
Which means exactly what? What political alternative do the whackado Qanon/ultraMAGAs have? Certainly not the democrats—they are so far out of alignment with MAGA that any Epstein disappointment looks mild in comparison. Sure…UltraMAGA may frustrated with Trump but they will never get a chance to vote for him again to express that disappointment. So they will be faced with a choice of a GOP candidate who will run on much of Trumps politics (but won’t be him) and a democrat party that appears now to be tacking further left in to the socialism waters as its new bearing.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" is the perfect meme to destroy confidence in trump.
So... The window has been moved completely off of the house. Raping children is actually acceptable among the MAGA base and Epstein is no longer a concern for them. Woops.
To be fair, polling bias applies. Probably not that high, but still. Even among die-hard, that's bad.
For him at least I don’t think there’s anything deeper other than he found this way to get people to either adore him or hate him. In either case he’s the center of attention.
Once the toy he stops generating attention, he will get bored and he will find a new toy.
This is, fairly overtly, a step (not the first step, but another step) towards a nationwide militarized police state.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/politics/us-capitol-riot-hearing-dhs-fbi-pentagon/index.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
Pelosi didn’t do it. But she wasn’t responsible for doing it, and the board Mr Sund chaired could have done it themselves much faster.
And all of this is just what they are allowed. It did not stop trump from doing his job. Which he didn’t…
https://policy.defense.gov/portals/11/Documents/hdasa/references/2_USC_1970.pdf
Provision of assistance Assistance under this section shall be provided -
(A) consistent with the authority of the Capitol Police under sections 1961 and 1966 of this title;
(B) upon the advance written request of -
(i) the Capitol Police Board; or
(ii) in an emergency -
(I) the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate in any matter relating to the Senate; or
(II) the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives in any matter relating to the House of Representatives; and
(C)(i) on a temporary and reimbursable basis;
(ii) on a permanent reimbursable basis upon advance written request of the Capitol Police Board; or
(iii) on a temporary basis without reimbursement by the Department of Defense and the Coast Guard as described under paragraph (1)
That would mean treason on his part if he overruled the Sergeant.
Mr. Sund was the chief of the Capitol Police that day.
any effective deployment would have had to occur ahead of time, when it would not have been considered an emergency
How could he overrule the Sergeant ? That would mean treason - he would be thrown under the bus and spend a decade-plus in jail.
Also Pelosi herself explicitly took responsibility for not granting approval for the National Guard. She is herself on video stating this.
Where was the NG when they were needed the most? And why?
They were? I didn't see them keeping the mob at bay, or protecting the Capital from being stormed, in the footage I saw. Do you have a link to said footage that you can provide?
As mentioned already, they got there late, but the statement that they were not deployed on Jan 6 is patently false.
First past the post yo.
This time it has the neat side effect of letting them cleanly appoint Trump for a third term without him being elected twice, which (it will be claimed) does not violate the 22nd amendment.
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”
Your understanding is incredibly confused. Yes, electors need to meet within each state to cast their ballots at a location specified by each state.
Those ballots are certified by (a) state official(s) (on or before December 12th) and those ballots are then forwarded to DC (IIRC, to the National Archives) and those certified ballots are conveyed to the capital for counting on January 6th.
So, no. The electors needn't go to Washington DC to "cast their ballots." In fact, if they did so on the appointed day for them to cast their ballot, they'd be unable to do so, as that process would be proceeding without them in the state which designated them as an elector.
I really hope you're not an American citizen.
Not as a "gotcha," but to clarify the process for others who may not be well informed about it.
I'd note that I was also incorrect. Sealed ballots from each state are sent to the President of the Senate, not the National Archives. My mistake.
The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted."
[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text
;-)
But this time around he has a playbook of “inching towards autocracy” very well defined and milestoned. He is executing on it very well too
I have reservations about this line of thought.
For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact. If the actions they took have brought them here, of what use were the actions?
And second, I would like to see some hard evidence that you have in fact effected/enacted change by showing up beyond just being more informed and participating in what can otherwise be (from personal experience) either a snooze-fest or an echo chamber.
Sure, it might be a "snooze-fest", but you're not there for excitement.
I don't intent this comment to be a "you're wrong" comment. I'm only saying that OP's POV runs on an assumption that can be damaging.
Yeah, and they're a big part of the reason why housing is a messed up as it is.
This lets the people who do pay attention have complete capture. You know your rent is high? Yea that's mostly your state and municipal government doing the bidding of landlords and landed gentry.
At least I thought that when living in GA and saw most of the modern governors both Democratic and Republican weren’t bat shit crazy.
Kemp (Republican) is still sort of trying to hold the line against the GA MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
But then I moved to Florida…
Which I’m not saying is good, but we should separate the bluster from the reality.
From this article
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/11/trump-dc-fbi-national-guard-deployment/
On national guard, 200 people at a time focused on administrative work:
> U.S. Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said that most National Guard troops live locally and that the idea is to deploy them in shifts of 200 soldiers each to provide a round-the-clock presence.
> The troops for now will be focused on providing logistical and administrative support to free up D.C. police officers, similar to their support role at the southern U.S. border.
And they basically don’t want to actually run the police dept:
> Trump named Terry Cole, the head of the DEA, as interim commissioner of the D.C. police. Cole told Police Chief Pamela A. Smith on Monday evening that the federal team is hoping for the Metropolitan Police Department to lead the effort,
> Cole described Trump’s takeover of the department as more of a collaboration, and he stressed that officials would meet and work together to figure out where to deploy resources, the official said.
Basically they’re putting bodies out there so DC can put more local cops in the streets. And they really don’t know how to run anything when it comes to policing DC. How would they? They need the local cops to actually understand the issues.
Not saying any of this is good. But wanted to add this context.
But to take the opposite maximalist “Trump is a maniacal dictator” position ignores the pattern of bluster and back down from Trump.
Save your mental sanity. His goal is your outrage. He doesn’t have a plan.
DC's mayor hasn't said the same thing as the Feds.
Controlling the physical space around Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy means that every legislator, judge, and federal worker sees the Guard on their commute.
The message is environmental and atmospheric. Propaganda for the governing class. Power made visible to those for whom there is intent to intimidate.
Extending that, DC notoriously exists as an anomaly violating the foundation that the US was founded on. It is a city that isn't a city, a population with little representation in the federal apparatus that controls it.
DC's legal vulnerability makes it perfect for testing. What works there can be threatened elsewhere. "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.
The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period.
> "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.
The fact that Trump mobilized troops in LA to help with ICE raids was way more worrying, but they were withdrawn a week and a half ago by the Pentagon without much hullabaloo.
This is not just a run-of-the-mill news story. It's a fight for the rights enshrined in our constitution.
(And yes - I framed that the way a chatbot might to emphasize the point.)
You're going to have a hard time convincing me this is "overly dramatic" given the context.
DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!
I salute your honesty about what it is you think (and I agree!) this is actually about.
Obviously deploying literal military force against the homeless is batshit crazy. But that is where we are.
I’m not a democrat. Help me steel-man your point.
1) Americans deserve a capital city that's at least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego, which have homicide rates one-third or one-quarter as high as D.C. over the last decade--even excluding the COVID-era spike in homicides.
2) The orderliness of a city is primarily an issue of policing and incarceration. You don't need to pass national gun control, or address "root causes"--just take gang members off the streets and put them in prison.
3) The problem isn't unique to D.C., but D.C. is an outlier because (a) the aesthetics of D.C. are important because it's the nation's capital; and (b) Trump has express statutory authority to federalize the D.C. police force under the DC Home Rule Act. DC thus can serve as a testbed for Republican policing in a major city, most of which won't elect Republican mayors.
Perhaps we have a different definition of “appropriate.”
Neither of those cities are very safe and orderly. Didn’t 3 people just get killed in Austin yesterday? DC is also tiny compared to the outlying cities that surround it. Baltimore anyone?
This is probably just more distraction to get the news stories away from those Epstein files.
Pre-covid, Austin’s homicide rate was around 4 per 100k. San Diego’s is typically under 4x DC’s never got below 14 per 100k (in 2012) and spiked up to 40 per 100k in 2023.
DC is 20% more populous than Baltimore. The nearest city larger than DC is Philly, 140 miles away.
There are 6.3 million in the greater DC area, DC is a small part of what goes on in that region.
I'm sure they exist somewhere -- but downtown DC is definitely not "covered" with homeless encampments.
The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.
For a large swath of the USA homelessness is a real possibility and whether or not they will end up in that situation is mostly a game of chance.
If you really do not like the liberal policies that cities tend to have then maybe you should vote with your feet and move to a rural area or to a city that is run by the Republicans? Then you can be with the people who see things your way.
Oh, wait...
Your complaint isn’t really about “dismantling democracy,” but instead about Trump running roughshod over all the Democrats who run DC even when the people elect a Republican President, such as the anti-democratic permanent civil service. DC is the people’s city. It is constitutionally a federal enclave, and under the DC Home Rule Act the President has the right to federalize the police. Trump did so to carry out the policies people voted for.
If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…
> Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.
Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?
Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.
I was just there for a week, mainly in the downtown area, and honestly don't recall seeing a single homeless person.
You've really been stockholm-syndromed by this godforsaken country and Western culture's persistent aversion to enforcing the law against anyone perceived as less fortunate. This wouldn't be acceptable in peer Eastern countries' capitals like Singapore, Tokyo, or Beijing
As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.
[1] This is obviously true, because every city has poor people, but not every city allows homeless people and serial criminals to intrude on the public sphere. Tokyo has many, many people who are quite poor by the material standards of DC. Tokyo isn’t clean and orderly because it somehow got rid of all the poor people.
Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.
Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.
Bagehot divided the dignified and the efficient. I've long thought that one glaring downside of the American presidential system is that it tries to combine the two roles in one office.
The majority of non-monarchic parliamentary systems still have a separate chief of state and head of government (including semi-presidential systems, which are basically parliamentary democracies but the chief of state has a wider set of formal powers without being head of government).
In the EU, for instance, excluding monarchies and presidential systems, every single member state fits the pattern of having a separate chief of state and head of government, mostly with the same titles. Here's a list of EU states that aren't monarchies or presidential systems, identifying whether they are parliamentary or semi-presidential and, if the separated CoS and HoG have titles other than the most common, what those titles are. Unless noted, in the examples, the usual English title of the CoS is "President" and the HoG is "Prime Minister", exceptions have the HoG title in parens (there are not exceptions for the CoS title.)
Austria: Parliamentary (Chancellor), Bulgaria: Parliamentary, Croatia: Parliamentary, Czechia: Parliamentary, Estonia: Parliamentary, Finland: Parliamentary, France: Semi-presidential, Germany: Parliamentary (Chancellor), Greece: Parliamentary, Hungary: Parliamentary, Ireland: Parliamentary (Taoiseach), Italy: Parliamentary, Latvia: Parliamentary, Lithuania: Semi-Presidential, Malta: Parliamentary, Poland: Semi-Presidential, Portugal: Semi-Presidential, Romania: Parliamentary, Slovakia: Parliamentary, Slovenia: Parliamentary
This only works on paper, and on paper congress or SCOTUS would've stepped in much sooner.
In practice, the monarch either has a lot of power, or does whatever the real head of government wants. Especially with how Trump can claim that he has the mandate of the people given that he won the election, and it's not like he doesn't wrap his motives behind legitimate claims. It's pretty easy to just claim that he has to do X for the security of the nation.
In reality, if the US had a monarch, they too would've gone along with whatever Trump wanted because to not do so is the nuclear option. It would be the equivalent of states trying to secede or not recognizing the current administration as legitimate and choosing to declare Harris as the real POTUS.
In a monarchy, laws often restrict people from insulting the monarch. Not in UK, I believe, but even British culture pays their respects to the king. As a result, the king's words hold a lot of power. A president can "talk down" to congress, but a PM is still a servant of the king.
Let's say someone like Sir Richard Branson decides to do a Trump. If he claimed that he had to do X for the security of the nation, the king would be able to call him out on it. As head of military, the king has access to all the confidential data. The Supreme Court and Congress may be missing data. As the PM has to get the king to rubber stamp military actions, the king still has the right to veto it.
That's not true in the case of European constitutional monarchies. The elected government has total power except for some very specific duties around the administration of government, like dissolving parliament. And even then, those are largely ceremonial.
I do think having so much power with one person who cannot easily be replaced at any point is bad for democratic government. In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant.
"In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant."
Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM. Often one that promises to do the opposite of what the previous PM did, then forgets the promises or blames them on something else.
I guess that depends which country you're talking about. The UK has had a bad time of it leadership wise, but I would say this is probably an accurate reflection of the divisions and problems it faces as a country. Or maybe people just remember the stability of Thatcher and Blair and forget that isn't the norm by PM, just the norm by time because those individuals lasted so long. I live in NZ where the system is a bit more coalition driven and that seems more stable between elections (nobody wants to be seen as the one wrecking the current parties power) and less between because everyone can switch sides.
I don't know a single one, maybe Thailand comes close? Though with > 50% of their senate members appointed by the military I would not even call them a democracy, not even close.
One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajang_Move
There was a popular candidate a party wanted as prime minister, who was not yet allowed to run as senator because of a sodomy conviction. So they tried to get his wife elected into a prominent position to streamline his path to prime minister. The party held the richest state in the country by a large majority and forced the head of state to step down, triggering a by-election. The wife won elections easily in that territory. It was a dick move because she is never physically in the area, but the area also didn't want to elect the Islamist party and voted for this more secular party. So she was voted as senator representing citizens in a region she didn't particular care about.
But senator wasn't enough, they wanted her in a head of state position. The sultan called out this BS and requested three names for candidates. The party submitted only one name. Sultan insisted on three names, and when they submitted three, he picked the second name as head of state.
So while kings don't have the power to block a democratic process, in this case, it prevented nepotism, which would also have messed up democracy.
In 2022, none of the three major coalitions won enough seats to form the government. Votes were split 38%, 30%, 22%. They all hated each other and part of the campaign promises were to bring down the other coalitions for corruption. The monarch ended up combining the parties into a unity government, which also entailed picking the Prime Minister.
A constitutional monarchy is what you get starting from an absolute monarchy and gradually draining the power out of it and transferring it to democratic institutions. It then satisfies the demand of the public who want the roleplay of an absolute ruler, and are scared of a fully egalitarian system, but without letting them actually do any absolutism.
King Charles does not have operational control of the military. He only has a large amount of personal loyalty, which is not quite the same thing. He holds a number of operational ranks from his service, from which he is retired, and a number of honorary senior titles.
The UK is just as vulnerable to troops-on-the-streets fascism as anywhere else. (Bloody Sunday etc)
The downside is of course, the monetary and social costs of having such an organ. But perhaps it's useful in the same sense the appendix is. When an illness catches the intestines, the appendix can best case be a reservoir of good and recolonize the intestines. Something like that happened in Spain.
To this day, bullet holes remain in the ceiling of the Spanish parliament building to remind them of the coup attempt. I can't find it anymore, but there was a good drama movie about these events on Netflix a while ago.
No Javascript required
x=https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/11/us/trump-news
echo url=$x|curl -K- -A "googlebot" > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm In D.C. 2020, the Guard put the peak daily cost at ~$2.65M for ~5,000 troops, about $530 per Guard/day. That’s a decent order-of-magnitude yardstick for today. Source: Reuters (contemporaneous) – https://www.reuters.com/article/world/what-was-the-cost-for-the-national-guard-to-deploy-in-dc-up-to-26-million-a-idUSKBN23J05Y/
For a rough scale: 800–1,200 troops = mid–six figures per day, before you add transport/lodging decisions that move the number a lot. A recent LA activation was budgeted $134M for 60 days ($2.2M/day) off DoD testimony, which matches that ballpark.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/ is stil ticking along nicely.
Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.
"The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission."
It's confusing because DC does not have a governor so it looks like an edge case that has not been tested before.
Source: https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/use-national-guard-support-drug-interdiction-efforts-district-columbia