Hi everyone!
Trump has begun to federalize Washington, DC. As one of my colleagues at The Post Millennial put it, "Hopefully we can bring our son back to DC." The crime has been crazy, and even though it's dropped from recent year highs, it's still way too much for a city of only about 700,000. Now, under the resurrected Home Rule Act, there will be National Guard on the streets, and the Metro PD is under federal control.
It turns out that a lot of the violent crimes are being committed by juveniles, which in DC is anyone under the age of 25. 56% of carjackings were committed by juveniles since 2023. US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro said that when the Metro PD arrests someone under 25, they are brought to a juvenile holding facility and their parents are called to collect them.
Last night, the Metro PD implemented a curfew for the Navy Yard neighborhood, which routinely sees throngs of teens terrorizing people. Now, juveniles have to stay off the streets from 8 pm to 6 am. This is for sure a start, but perhaps the kids should just be off the streets every night across the city.
Trump has vowed to clean up the city, to make it a showplace and not a dump. He said it's just not a good look for the capital of the greatest nation on earth. And he's right. Our capital should be beautiful, clean, safe, and welcoming. No gangs of teens should be wandering around committing carjackings, burglaries, muggings, stabbings, or shootings.
The curfew comes after shootings that left a person critically injured on Monday, right after fools like Maxine Waters protested Trump's policies. I see her running her mouth with a bunch of "Trump bad" nonsense but I don't see her doing anything to protect DC residents from wilding kids wandering around intentionally causing mayhem and destruction just for fun.
A report out this morning also says that the Pentagon is preparing a plan to have National Guard troops on standby near major cities across the country so that they can move in at a moment's notice. I do not relish the thought of seeing armed troops on the streets of our cities, but I also think we've let our cities run to ruin.
Soft-on-crime policies like having more empathy for the perpetrators of crimes than the victims, Covid lockdowns and restrictions which essentially told American young people that school doesn't matter—if it did, how could it close for weeks at a time and be replaced with video calls and lax grading measures? have all led us down a bad path. The practice of allowing shoplifting, open drug use, and all the rest of it has to come to an end. I hope this is a course correction.