In August, the President of the United States declared a crime ‘emergency’ in my home town of Washington D.C. Donald Trump rules by declaring ‘emergencies’ where they don’t exist, but this was a new one. An emergency compared to what? The year I bought my condo, 1992, saw 443 homicides ina city of around half a million people; last year, there were only 190 out of almost 700,000. I say ‘only’ because we’ve become so used to a murder rate 20 times that of London that we somehow managed to ignore it.
That, of course, was an option only for white residents – unless you were dumb enough (as I was) to buy a newly renovated loft in an edgy, gentrifying, but still largely black neighbourhood. Such a steal! A dead body showed up behind the building in the first month; the late evenings crackled with gunshots as spring arrived; the house across the street, I slowly realised, was where the local gang gathered: the 17th and Euclid Street crew. ‘It’s not a crack house; it’s a crack home,’ was a parody article in the Onion in 1996. But in the row-house I walked past every day, it was a reality.
I remember the nearby park back then as well. The rather grand Meridian Hill Park – designed by the legendary Frederick Law Olmstead (of Central Park fame) – had been renamed Malcolm X Park after the 1968 riots destroyed the city. Way too dangerous at night, and pretty damn iffy in the daylight, used needles and condoms lay under your feet; the lawn that clung on was weeds and dirt; shrubs had become a toilet for the homeless; and the old fountain that once cascaded down a bevelled waterpark was defunct, used by skateboarders.
Then things shifted. New money arrived with the new century, along with 150,000 new (largely white) residents, property prices boomed and crime collapsed. The blocks of old housing gentrified around me. The park was re-seeded, the fountain turned on, the trees pruned, flowers planted, and weekend by weekend, more young white, Asian and brown kids dotted the place, throwing frisbees, organising picnics and furiously out-woking each other. The Obama era was a good one for the city.
At the edges, however, chaos still hovered, and then the pandemic came. The BLM protests demoralised the cops, whose ranks thinned; crime soared again; more and more bored kids were committing more and more crimes, the streets emptied and the park got scarier. One day, I was nearly run over by a thug on a motorbike, yelling racist slurs; homeless people hooked up Bluetooth speakers to wires attached to lampposts and blasted noise day and night; needles showed up again; my dog dived into a bush and came out covered in human diarrhoea, grinning widely. I almost felt some nostalgia.
And as you felt the anarchy slowly creep back, the D.C. mayor shrugged. The D.C. council proposed lowering sentences for carjacking, even as rates doubled. In a majority-black one-party city, shrugging comes naturally. It’s a city where only 6 per cent – yes, 6 per cent – of its black high-school graduates are proficient in maths. Hell, even I shrugged at the idea of Trump’s crime ‘emergency’, as he put 800 National Guard soldiers in the city. Such naivety! And he had no right to intervene. Legally, the ‘emergency’ was baseless. I harrumphed at the overreach from my holiday home on Cape Cod, hundreds of miles from the stifling city.
And then, as I came back in October, I had to eat my harrumphs. The city felt instantly different: calmer, quieter, saner. In the park, the fountain wasn’t turned back on, but the quiet there had become as contagious as the previous din. It was ten days before I was accosted by a mentally ill homeless person on the street – something that was a daily occurrence before. It was a month before I heard the first boombox disturbing the peace.
The data backed up my impression: violent crime fell by 50 per cent, compared with the same period last year; robberies were down 35 per cent. Clearance rates for homicides hit a ten-year high. Sixteen children died by gunshot in D.C. in 2023. This year? Three so far, all before the troops arrived. All it took was a symbolic show of military authority and the atmosphere dramatically shifted. This is the paradox of living in America in 2025: a president who routinely breaks the law to enforce order, and city governments lawfully empowered to control crime and incapable of it. Take your pick. I only wish I didn’t have to.
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