In the days since the president deployed hundreds of National Guard troops and federal agents to patrol city streets, crime has continued to drop in Washington. The question is whether the trend will last.
Local politicians, along with people who study crime for a living, say probably not.
In Washington, local elected officials have called President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to fight street crime a power grab — just a temporary show of force unlikely to produce any durable reductions in crime, since leaving hundreds of troops on the ground indefinitely is unsustainable.
“The reason that surges are not particularly effective, and are generally disfavored by crime researchers and others who look at this stuff for a living, is because it’s a resource-intensive way of temporarily reducing crime,” said Thomas Abt, director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction. “If it does in fact reduce crime, that doesn’t address any of the underlying conditions.”
If the president is interested in long-term solutions, experts suggested a number of other ways the federal government could help drive down crime rates in a more lasting way, from funds for training and recruitment for local officers to ideas that are less obviously focused on crime. One is something Mr. Trump himself has already floated: a $2 billion dollar spending project to spruce up Washington’s public spaces, including fixing sidewalks, improving parks and adding new streetlights.
“It’s going to be beautiful, all those lightbulbs,” Mr. Trump told reporters recently.
Lightbulbs actually do have a role to play in cutting down on street crime. Lighting up dark spaces, planting grass on vacant lots, refurbishing abandoned homes and otherwise fixing up the city landscape are widely seen as simple and effective ways for cities to reduce gun violence, backed by studies in Flint, Mich., and Philadelphia.
Urban spaces that are well lit, with pleasant places to gather, mean there are more eyes on the street watching for trouble. They also promote tighter community ties among neighbors, preventing violent episodes. The idea is not dissimilar to older ideas about combating crime, known as the “broken windows” theory, which focused on cleaning up streets and cracking down on disorder. But one difference is that the older model was often coupled with policing tactics that have since been criticized as discriminatory.
The president’s plan to beautify the capital would be a welcome component of an earnest crime-fighting strategy, researchers say. But it would have to include the parts of the city where most of the gun violence and other crime occurs, not just the areas around the White House and the Mall that Mr. Trump has promised to beautify.
“If he did that, that could be helpful,” said Jens Ludwig, an economist and director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “Just because Trump proposes it does not mean that it is necessarily a bad idea and a contradiction of evidence.”
Mr. Trump has suggested his takeover of the Washington police and deployment of the National Guard to the city is a dress rehearsal of sorts for an influx of federal officers and soldiers onto the streets of other major cities, with Chicago likely up next. He has portrayed American cities as dystopian hellscapes even as violent crime has declined sharply in recent years after a surge during the coronavirus pandemic.
But Mr. Trump’s diagnosis of crime as a major issue in the country resonates with many Americans, including scholars who say that while crime may be down the country still suffers from unacceptable levels of violence, especially compared with other developed countries. Many people in Washington, though dismayed by the president’s approach, agree that more should be done to reduce the city’s crime levels.
The problem is that “it’s not an earnest effort” by the president to actually reduce crime, said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former police officer in Baltimore.
Mr. Moskos said the federal government could do a number of things if it wanted to help cities lower crime. It could boost funding for grants to recruit more police officers, help clear more cases by dealing with backlogs in testing rape kits and DNA samples, and build national training facilities for the police.
“There’s so much that could be centralized,” he said. “But no one seems to be serious about this.”
Other experts said the federal government could increase funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, office within the Department of Justice. The program began under President Clinton as part of the 1994 crime bill, and for the last three decades has disbursed grants for hiring new officers and for crime and violence prevention programs, although its budget this fiscal year of $437 million is much smaller than it was in the late 1990s, when it was more than $1 billion.
The Trump administration plans to cut the office’s budget further — although it will boost COPS’s grants for hiring new officers by about $50 million — and consolidate it within a different agency at the Department of Justice.
Another solution Mr. Moskos suggested would be for the federal government to make data collecting more timely and comprehensive, which would help local officials better understand the problem.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on Thursday touted data that shows crime has declined in Washington since the president sent soldiers and federal agents into the streets, and defended the president’s strategy.
“The numbers prove the president’s bold actions to make D.C. safe and beautiful again are working, just like he said they would,” she told reporters.
In girding for the possible deployment of the National Guard to his city, Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago has said that if the federal government wanted to help the city improve public safety it would restore the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for community violence prevention groups that President Trump has cut. These groups help mediate disputes, mentor at-risk youths, and provide substance abuse treatment, mental health support and job assistance.
“There are many things the federal government could do to help us reduce crime and violence in Chicago, but sending in the military is not one of them,” Mayor Johnson has said.
Michel Moore, the former police chief of Los Angeles, said he worried that Mr. Trump’s actions on crime will make communities less safe because federal law enforcement may end up in conflict with the local police, damaging relationships that in the past have been important in tackling big cases, like organized crime and terrorism. He said deploying federal agents for low-level immigration enforcement or to walk the streets of Washington takes them away from more serious crime.
“I don’t see that as being in our best interest,” he said. He said he wished the federal government would help local agencies fight crime by boosting grants. “There are funding opportunities galore for local law enforcement,” he said. “Whether it be equipment, technology, staffing.”
And he said the recent cuts to community groups are particularly alarming, saying he saw the benefits from his time as chief in Los Angeles. The groups often helped to “de-escalate tensions in neighborhoods and in many instances stop the retaliatory shootings, the back-and-forth,” he said.
David M. Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said there is a growing body of evidence that reducing gun violence requires a sustained focus on the handful of places where it concentrates. He said that in cities seeing the most significant decreases in crime, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, officials are “using a scalpel, not a dragnet.”
In other words, the opposite of the approach taken by Mr. Trump in Washington.
“Everything in crime strategy is about focus on the people and places that drive crime,” said Adam Gelb, the president of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization. “And the current deployment seems to be casting a very wide and unfocused net.”
The approach Mr. Kennedy has developed — often called “focused deterrence” — involves a coordinated effort by law enforcement, city officials, community groups and social services. They select individuals who are considered high risk for violence, then meet with them and offer services and counseling. They also warn them that they will be arrested and prosecuted if the warnings are not heeded.
Mr. Kennedy said that many of the community violence groups whose funding was recently cut have played important roles in expanding this strategy in American cities.
“The current administration’s cuts will do enormous damage to that institutionalization and that movement, and can absolutely be expected to cost lives,” he said.
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.
Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles.
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