My sister is having a bad summer.
Even as I’m typing this, Peggy is at [Washington] DC police headquarters.
We had dinner in Georgetown recently and when we came back to my house, where her car was parked, she was short a Buick.
Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers.
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One officer said that even if they saw the perp driving her car, they could not chase him because of laws passed by the DC council.
Kids – some too young to drive legally – can just hot-wire cars to go home. Two 15-year-olds are charged in a carjacking attack on a former DOGE [department of government efficiency] employee who helped set off US president Donald Trump’s crusade on crime in the district. The council has been notoriously lax toward juvenile offenders.
Peggy had always loved that Buick, which she bought because Peyton Manning was the pitchman. We figured we’d never see it again.
The next morning, though, an officer from Prince George’s County, a working-class Maryland suburb, banged on her door. Her car was found in a park, running and nearly out of gas. When she collected it, after paying a $215 (€214) towing charge, she found an odoriferous collection: half-eaten pizza, soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a couple of debit cards.
She called police to tell them about the debit cards, thinking they could help trace the thieves. (Our dad, after all, was a DC cop.) But officers said to throw them away, noting that the cardholders had probably already gotten new ones.
Peggy got the car detailed and celebrated its return by going shopping at Bloomingdale’s. When she got back to her parking space, someone had T-boned the poor Buick [collided with the car].
Then, icing on the cake, she got more than $1,800 worth of speed-camera tickets that the car thieves had racked up going 70 in 25mph (40km/h) zones, and some for running red lights. One ticket revealed that the car was stolen just after she got out of it, at 7pm, still light outside.
For all we know, the thieves watched her get out. She had to go down to headquarters on Friday to get the police report so she could appeal the tickets.
It’s hardly the most heinous crime, but you hear a lot about Washingtonians and their personal experiences of being preyed upon.
City officials and many liberal residents are outraged about Trump’s painting the district as a hellscape and flooding the zone with law enforcement and troops.
Protesters around town held up signs reading “Fascists” and a department of justice employee (now fired) threw a Subway sandwich at an officer and was charged with assault.
It’s ridiculous to drag FBI agents from their desks to be cops on the beat. And the tableau of national guard troops – even unarmed – raises the spectre of martial law being normalised and weaponised. (Armed and masked border patrol agents showing up at a Gavin Newsom gerrymandering speech in Los Angeles was disturbing.)
It is also true that many district residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don’t feel safe.
I’ve always been hypervigilant. My mom, the wife of a policeman, passed down a healthy paranoia. She drove me to move into my dorm at Catholic University with a butcher knife on the seat between us. She gave me a Chinese letter opener with written instructions on how to find the jugular. At Christmas, there was always a can of pepper spray or a whistle among the presents.
I find myself packing pepper spray again. I feel more wary walking around the city. It’s disturbing to ask someone to unlock the Claritin at CVS because the police don’t lock up the smash-and-grabbers. Drugstores, as Bill Maher said, have become a “zoo for teeth-whitening strips”.
Trump is playing the saviour on crime when he’s the biggest scofflaw [law breaker] in town – first inciting the mob on January 6th and then pardoning felons who broke into the Capitol and beat up police officers.
Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst and author of the forthcoming book, When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, From Nixon to Trump, summed up the dilemma.
“Yes, Trump is hypocritical and scattershot on public safety,” he told me. “And yes, he’s likely doing this as a flex. But he happens to be within the law here and he happens to be right.”
While the district’s homicide rate has fallen, it’s almost as high as New York City’s at its most dangerous, in 1990.
In the Atlantic, Michael Powell noted that the reality of crime is grimmest in Wards 7 and 8, the disadvantaged, majority-Black neighbourhoods where more than half of the district’s homicides occurred last year.
“I have no doubt that Trump enjoys targeting Democratic-controlled cities for embarrassment,” Powell writes. “I also have little doubt that a mother in Ward 8 might draw comfort from a National Guard soldier standing watch near her child’s school.”
The diva of distraction is putting on a show. (They’re eating the cats and the dogs!) But progressives should not fall into Trump’s trap and downplay crime, once more getting on the wrong side of an inflammatory issue. As with inflation, they should remember that personal experiences can count more than sanguine statistics.
Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend that everything is fine here. Because it’s not.
- This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
