Brehm: Trump’s D.C. crime crackdown is great politics and even better policy

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In 2023, the City of Lakes averaged one stolen car per hour over the course of several months, and auto owners drove and parked their vehicles in Minneapolis with peril. Minnesota’s chief law enforcement officer Attorney General Keith Ellison decided his constituents had had enough. And that it was time to get tough ... on car manufacturers.

Rather than bring down the might of his office onto Minneapolis lawbreakers, his solution to make the city safer was to go after Kia and Hyundai. To the anti-law-and-order Ellison, the villains in all of this were apparently Korean car companies and so he launched an investigation into their anti-theft technology. They, not thieves and vandals, became the ire of his army of attorneys.

So how did that work out?

Well, here we are two years later, and this newspaper’s headlines blare that Minneapolis is yet again awash in car vandalism. The Minneapolis Police Department has received around 475 reports of vehicle smash-and-grabs since the middle of just last month. And it doesn’t appear any arrests have been made thus far, in part because MPD policy, which makes zero sense to me, prohibits its officers from pursuing suspects that flee.

Could it be, using our attorney general’s previous logic, that the culprit is that automobile window manufacturers produce glass that’s just too breakable? Of course not. The obvious problem is that criminals in Hennepin County fear no reprisal and do as they please. As is the case in most American metropolitan areas governed by soft-on-crime leaders.

There is no question the president has the constitutional authority to take matters into his own hands when it comes to public safety in D.C. His office affords him the prerogative to deploy National Guard troops to unsafe capital streets and place the Metropolitan Police Department under the national government’s control. So says the Constitution, which recognizes Washington not as an independent state but as a federal district, and the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973, which explicitly gives Trump the levers he is pulling. 

But he also maintains the moral authority to do so. The District of Columbia, where I lived for a good portion of my happy youth, remains a magical but far too dangerous city. In 2023, its overall crime rate was more than double the national average. While criminality there is down somewhat since then, it continues to boast the fourth-highest murder rate of all U.S. cities. Washington is a lawless mess, and the federal government that calls it home is right to assert its authority to clean it up. The feckless municipal government there has had ample opportunity to do so, but, run by liberal ideologues, can’t. Enough is enough.

“We are now in the process of bringing to the attention of law-abiding citizens, not just in D.C., but throughout the country, that we’re not going to tolerate crime that is out of control in the nation’s capital,” said Jeanine Pirro, the new U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C.

In just one week, Trump’s onslaught on Washington crime already has procured more than 240 arrests and taken dozens of guns off the streets. Hurrah! Pirro has promised to throw the book at violent criminals in D.C., and now, if these thugs have any brains, they are likely fleeing as we speak to safer progressive climes like Baltimore. Washingtonians should be grateful that they will now be so much safer.

It astounds me how any of this is controversial. I remember the good old days when I was growing up and law and order was a bipartisan issue and both Democrats and Republicans agreed criminals needed to be cracked down on. But now not so much, particularly in Hennepin County where the DFL-endorsed chief prosecutor’s docket can look like a lullaby. A CNN survey released in June showed that 40% of voters found the GOP’s positions on crime closer to their own compared with only 27% who said that about Democrats. No wonder.

As a recovering alcoholic myself, I find it offensive that cities enable so many of their unwell by allowing them to remain in unsafe squalor and deadly addiction. This sensible approach by Trump is not only good news for Washingtonians, but also for the still sick and suffering addicts that struggle in misery under city bridges and dark alleyways. They deserve help and now will hopefully get it.

Democrats have argued for a long time that crime is just something city dwellers like me have to tolerate. The sorry state of our urban cores is inevitable thanks to COVID and other factors beyond control. And any improvement has to be slow and sluggish. At least that’s what they say over here in declining St. Paul.

But now, thanks to Trump, we will get to see whether a truly tough on crime approach works in a major U.S. city in this modern era. If it does in Washington, as I think it will, the president and his party will look very good to voters, who poll after poll show care deeply about public safety and want their cities to thrive again.