President Donald Trump yesterday announced what amounts to a federal takeover of law enforcement in the District of Columbia. He declared that he would deploy the National Guard and invoke an obscure provision of the city’s charter to take control of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department. This was all, he said, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”Is crime in D.C., as Trump put it last week, “totally out of control”? Critics were quick to dismiss his claims as fearmongering. They pointed to rapidly declining rates of violence over the past year. “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Mayor Muriel Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday.The reality is more complicated than either the president or the mayor depict. Bowser is right that violence has declined. But the nation’s capital really does have a long-standing and profound violence problem that will not improve without deliberate intervention.Like most other big cities, D.C. experienced a surge in violence during the pandemic. A timely analysis from the crime researcher Jeff Asher shows that murder crested in December 2023 and has been declining steadily since; the 2025 total through last month equals the equivalent figure in 2019. Carjackings are also down; Asher reports that July saw the fewest monthly carjackings since May 2020.[Jonathan Chait: This isn’t about crime]Look beyond the recent past, and the trend lines are less sunny. Although violent-crime rates overall are near 30-year lows, Washington’s murder rate was generally rising even before the pandemic. The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020. Lastly, Asher highlights some discrepancies between the city’s official violent-crime statistics and what it reports to the FBI, with the latter showing a more gradual decline in overall violence.Notably, both sets of statistics seem out of keeping with the views of D.C. residents. About 65 percent of them told The Washington Post that crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem last year, even as violence declined.Perhaps locals are responding to a measurable increase in public disorder—petty offenses such as vagrancy, shoplifting, and unsanitary conditions, which drive our perceptions of major crime. As I noted in a Manhattan Institute report last summer, indicators such as unsheltered homelessness and sanitation-enforcement requests to the city’s 311 line have spiked (and those trends continue into this year). When Trump complains of rising “squalor,” he’s not off base.Such problems on their own would not necessarily warrant a federal takeover, though. What might is the fact that although crime is declining, Washington is still far more dangerous than the capital of the United States should be. Let’s not define deviancy down.D.C.’s homicide rate in 2024—roughly 26.4 homicides for every 100,000 residents—is lower than in both 2023 and its peak in the 1990s. But, according to data compiled by the Council on Criminal Justice, it’s still nearly seven times higher than New York City’s rate (3.8 per 100,000). D.C.’s rate is also worse than that of Philadelphia, Atlanta, and even Chicago. In fact, it’s closer to that of infamously crime-ridden cities like Memphis and Detroit than it is to some other important metropoles’.The problem looks even worse in the most violence-plagued parts of the city. As I found in my report, in 2023, 57 percent of the city’s homicides took place in Wards 7 and 8, the city’s poorest, with the largest percentage of Black residents. In fact, just 10 blocks in D.C. were home to 14 percent of all homicides. As in many cities, violence is also hyperconcentrated among tight social networks. According to a 2021 report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, in any given year about 500 people are responsible for 60 to 70 percent of all gun violence in the city.This violence takes a dreadful toll on the communities it affects. In 2023, the most recent year for which complete data are available, 3.4 out of every 1,000 Black boys and men ages 15 to 24 in Washington died by homicide. That’s nearly 3.5 times higher than the national rate. Not all of D.C. may be like a “war-torn country.” But these rates of death are on par with those of American combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the second-order effects on the rest of D.C. are similar in kind if not in scope, leading to closed businesses and flight to the suburbs.A federal takeover of D.C.’s crime apparatus could, in theory, address this problem, though it’s far from guaranteed. There’s a real risk that the feds could posture for 30 days—the window in which Trump will likely maintain control of the MPD—and then declare victory as violence continues its downward trajectory. That would, of course, do little to fix the real problems.If it wants to make a difference, instead of just look tough, the administration should focus its resources on the people and places that make the District unusually unsafe. The city has already identified the “power few” who drive the large majority of violent offending. The administration’s priority should be to target these people for apprehension, prosecution, and incapacitation—as soon as possible.The administration should also target the places where crime is most concentrated. Per an analysis from one D.C. crime researcher, the association between the level of crime in a police service area and its level of staffing is slight. The Police Executive Research Forum, in its assessment of MPD, found that less experienced officers are more likely to be assigned to the city’s worst-off areas. Research shows that deploying more senior officers reduces both crime and use of force—the opposite of what D.C. does. The administration could switch things up in a way that the city perhaps could not.[Listen: The evidence on policing and crime]Trump could also target disorder by redeploying MPD officers to help with camp clearance and police the Metro. Such problems should not be the administration’s first priority, especially given its brief window. But a visible police presence can help people feel safe, as well as be safe.A focused strategy—target the people and places that drive violence—has historical precedent. In 2005, the MPD and federal government implemented a “homicide reduction strategy” that combined federal cooperation with such “focused deterrence.” A precipitous drop in D.C. homicides seems to have followed.The success of 2005’s initiative shows that the administration does not need to preempt the District in order to bring crime down. At the same time, the fact that things have been so bad for so long demonstrates the partial truth of Trump’s critiques. D.C. may be getting better, but it’s still quite dangerous.The fight between Trump and the city matters much less, ultimately, than making D.C. safer. The most important thing is to recognize that the city has a real problem—and that someone needs to be responsible for fixing it.