Early on a Sunday morning, shots ring out on the 1300 block of Connecticut Avenue — steps away from Dupont Circle, a New York Sports Club, and the city’s only Brooks Brothers.
A Canada Goose coat robbery on the Metro train, a point-blank afternoon murder at Union Station, a Dupont Circle stabbing in broad daylight and knife-brandishing hooligan terrorizing grocery clerks at Safeway — all these have taken place since the turn of the new year.
It’s lawlessness as usual in the District of Columbia.
Washington, D.C., bears an ignoble distinction among the developed world’s most murderous cities. To put it in global context: In 2023, the District saw its deadliest year since 1997 at 40 homicides per 100,000 residents — just behind Johannesburg and clocking in at three times the rate of narco capital Bogotá.
For most of us, it’s the petty crime that becomes exhausting. At my neighborhood CVS, they keep the toilet paper under lock and key. A few blocks up the road, they shuttered a drugstore that simply couldn’t keep merchandise on its shelves, save the Life magazines. Our neighborhood hoodlums are so shameless, one tried to carjack a U.S. marshal guarding Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Meander by the Chinatown Metro stop on a summer night and you’ll find young men lurking around in ski masks and sunglasses. Perhaps they find the street lights uncomfortably bright. Plastic baggies and cash exchange hands. Keep that iPhone in your pocket and walk on with a sense of purpose.
The problem is not confined to relatively affluent Northwest D.C., where I live and now watch my back on evening walks. The Sunday before last, the city saw four shootings in 24 hours — one in each of its four quadrants.
Have local officials fallen asleep at the wheel? They may claim compassionate intentions, but the D.C. city council has for years pushed measures that actively undermine law and order. Caught by a national fever to defund the police, District lawmakers sought to slash millions from the Metropolitan Police Department budget in 2020. To her credit, Mayor Muriel Bowser has resisted the most extreme calls to neuter law enforcement and doubled down on police resources in her 2025 budget. But it’s too little and far too late from a mayor with a decade under her belt at city hall.
Further emblematic of District dysfunction, freshly expelled D.C. Councilmember Trayon White — who represented the underprivileged and disproportionately violent Ward 8 — is facing federal bribery charges. Prosecutors allege White agreed to accept $156,000 in exchange for pressuring D.C. agencies under his supervision to extend certain contracts, including those related to violence prevention. It’s brazen (alleged) bribery in the delivery of public safety.
The fact is that District of Columbia public safety is not a Democratic or Republican issue, nor is it merely a local concern. Failing to deliver the most basic function of government in Washington, D.C., is a national embarrassment that now requires federal intervention.
For all the “Taxation Without Representation” license plates and farcical shadow candidacies lodged by D.C. statehood advocates, recall that just three decades ago, the Clinton administration imposed a control board to steward an insolvent and dysfunctional city government. Beyond corruption and financial woes, 1990s D.C. was an epicenter of the crack cocaine wars that saw four-term Mayor Marion Barry jailed in an infamous sting.
“Home rule” is an altogether recent experiment in D.C. government. In 1974, the District elected its first mayor and city council in a century, after Richard Nixon signed the Home Rule Act into law. Local legislation remains subject to necessary congressional approval, and Congress has not hesitated to course-correct in bipartisan fashion — with the Senate voting 81-14 in 2023 to block a crime bill seeking to cut the maximum sentence for armed carjacking from 40 years to 24.
President Trump’s proposal to federalize D.C. — “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely flawlessly beautiful” — may sound stark to local bureaucrats, but it is the bold, solutions-oriented intervention we need to right the ship. It is well within his legal right to commandeer the MPD under emergency circumstances, though only for 48 hours without engaging Congress.
More permanent reform to home rule will require legislation to the effect of the Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident Act — or BOWSER Act — introduced last year and again earlier this month by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), aiming to altogether repeal the Home Rule Act.
For nearly two and a half centuries, the District of Columbia — in its neoclassical grandeur and sprawling public spaces — has stood as a physical manifestation of American ideals, a Winthropian “City upon a Hill.” Reasonable people will disagree about the mechanics of urban life, but public safety is an issue of common sense. As a matter of American pride, let’s restore law and order to our nation’s capital.
Samuel Zwickel is Washington, D.C. resident.
