There’s no shortage of problems with Donald Trump’s move to militarize the nation’s capital, but at the heart of the issue is the underlying premise: The president is responding to a public safety crisis that doesn’t appear to exist.
In fact, crime rates are down across the board in Washington, D.C., and violent crime rates have reached a 30-year low. We can say this with some confidence because U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office is still promoting a press statement from earlier this year that boasts about violent crime in the city dropping to a 30-year low.
Trump is aware of the statistics, and he has repeatedly told the public to believe his claims over the official data, but that’s not all he has said. The president has also repeatedly insisted that officials in D.C. secretly manipulated the data, releasing “fake crime numbers” in an alleged effort to discredit the apparent trend.
As is often the case, the president’s rhetoric has generated action from his administration. NBC News reported:
The Justice Department is investigating whether Washington, D.C., police manipulated data to make crime rates appear lower, two senior law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News. The investigation is being run out of the office of the U.S. attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, the officials said.
In fairness, it’s worth emphasizing the fact that the local NBC affiliate reported last month that a Metropolitan Police Department commander, Michael Pulliam, was suspended and put on leave in May after the department began investigating allegations he altered some crime data. Pulliam has denied the allegations.
That said, the details matter. As a Vox report explained, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser “has since stated that ‘we don’t believe [the investigation] implicates many cases,’ and the decline in violent crime in DC tracks with a national trend.”
What’s more, as the NBC News report noted, the new Justice Department investigation is “expected to go much further” than simply reviewing the allegations surrounding Pulliam. Finally, there’s the bigger picture, and the apparent fact that the DOJ has launched an unnecessary investigation in response to the president’s conspiracy theory. As The New York Times reported, the investigation “is likely to prompt new criticism that the administration is using the levers of the criminal justice system to pursue the president’s political opponents.” That seems like a safe bet.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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