I don’t know for sure whether the claims that crime was down substantially in Washington D.C. before the National Guard was deployed there are gtrue, or just the result of cereating intentionally bogus statistics.
But since nothing was done differently in the city/there were no major changes in how it was policed or how crimes were handled in the courts, it’s hard not to be suspicious about numbers that suddenly dropped so substantially.
With the above in mind, here are excerpts from Debra Heine’s article for amgreatness.com, which might shed some light on things:
House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller told reporters Monday that the Trump administration has uncovered a “massive scandal” in Washington D.C. involving the doctoring of crime statistics.
He said the alleged corruption is currently under investigation and said details of the corruption will soon be brought to light.
“The results will stun you,” he said.
Miller said D.C. already had the worst crime statistics in the United States when “honestly measured,” but those stats “dramatically understated how bad it was.”
The White House advisor told reporters that murders and homicides were allegedly being reported as accidents instead of murders.
“This is how severe the manipulation of the crime data has been in the city and it will all be uncovered and it will all be brought to light,” he said.
For the past two weeks—since the D.C. crime crackdown began—the city has not seen a single murder or homicide.
“No police officer working in the city can remember a time in their lives when there has been no murders, Miller asserted.
He said police officers have told him that members of the public have been thanking them for making D.C safe again.
Miller credited Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Terrance C. Cole with discovering that street criminals in Washington D.C. have been “doing business directly with the transnational criminal cartels,” which are foreign terrorist organizations.
“So not only was the city being run by these criminal thugs, but they were working with some of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on the planet to traffic weapons and drugs into this city,” he explained.
Is any of this really true? Or is Stephen Miller bloviating out baseless claims – something that, to his major discredit, Donald Trump has a rich and ongoing history of doing?
My guess, based on the fact that there have been no homicides in almost two weeks (when was the last time that happened?) and, more generally, the demonstrably lower crime rates since the National Guard was sent in, is that Mr. Miller’s comments are far closer to reality than claims that crime had already gone down in D.C.
That said, the jury is still out on the effect of the National Guard. Let’s give it more time to see whether this is a short-term phenomenon or a for-real consequence of The Guard patrolling the streets.
And even if it is for real (which, for the sake of D.C. citizens’ safety, I hope is the case) it doesn’t mean Trump can send The Guard into other cities…which, unlike D.C., are run by the state and not the federal government.
We’ll talk more about this as time goes on.
