OPINION: Trump Is Right about D.C.
But the National Guard and the feds won't fix the city.
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
Donald Trump is going to clean up Washington, D.C., and make it safe again.
The president says it is a dangerous city and he has sent federal law enforcement officers to bolster the efforts of the Metropolitan Police Department.
Trump is right. D.C. is a dangerous city, with murders and shootings almost every single night. Killings are so commonplace they seldom make the lead story on the 11 o’clock news anymore, except perhaps when a young child is gunned down.
But can four or five hundred federal policemen really make a difference? Were this auxiliary force pounding the streets Saturday night, there were at least three separate shootings in downtown D.C. The feds can’t be everywhere, which is the problem the city police force has long faced.
Even Trump’s sending in the National Guard will not mean someone will be able to patrol every inch of Washington. And how long can the president keep that military force there? As soon as the troops leave, things will go back to what they were.
Trump is also right when he says that the much of the violence is being caused by teenagers, as was the case when a former DOGE employee was attacked, the incident that led to Trump’s recent action.
Unfortunately, we live in a society that coddles young people, even those who would slit our throats for the tennis shoes we wear. These kids commit violent crimes, the police arrest them, and the judicial system sends them home the next day (sometimes the same night).
Kids as young as 11 or 12 gang up and carjack vehicles, steal parked cars, beat up pedestrians for no reason other than the pure joy of it and kill homeless men just to watch them die, videotaping the incident to show their friends.
They invade stores in groups and steal everything they can in broad daylight. They roar down the streets of DC on illegal motorcycles and dirt bikes and the police (by law) are powerless to chase them. After all, these are just young kids and they don’t know what they are doing.
Baloney! They know what they’re doing, and they know that they are almost certain to get away with their crimes. They just go before the judge and act pitiful, and they are back on the streets again.
Not that Washington is unique with this teenage lawless problem. It is virtually the same in every major inner city – Los Angeles, Detroit, New York and Chicago, which is probably the worst.
The problem has gotten so bad in D.C. that the city council has imposed curfews to keep kids off the streets in the middle of the night. The real question here is why are the kids on the streets in the middle of the night? Where are the parents?
Ah, now we get to the crux of the problem, the part no one wants to talk about because it is too sensitive. Too often there are no parents. We have a generation of kids that are raising themselves.
Oh, there might be a grandmother who is technically in charge, and maybe a mother who is still in the picture. But too many of these kids have no father and no family guidance. They are on their own.
We can point to my generation for this problem. The “free love” of the 1960s led to the end of the traditional family, which had served civilization well since the beginning of time. Kids need two parents – a father and a mother – to keep them straight.
They also need an extended family to guide and correct them when they are not at home. It really does take a village to raise a child. When I was growing up, anyone seeing me misbehave put me in my place really quick. You do that now and you get sued. “I’ll correct my own child!” Trouble is, too many parents don’t.
Fathers? Sometimes while photographing sports teams I’d run into a child with a familiar name and, figuring I might know the family, I’d ask, “Who’s your father?” Too often the reply was, “I ain’t got no father.” I quit asking.
As I said, nobody wants to talk about this but herein lies the real problem. Unmarried women having children by multiple men; Men fathering children with multiple women. Live-in boyfriends, which often leads to child abuse. And live-in boyfriends that may change on a regular basis.
It used to be that such lifestyles were not only frowned upon but scorned. Now they are commonplace and nobody bats an eye. But what it has led to is a society with kids that are ignored and allowed to do as they please. And our permissive society, including the kids, pays.
Neither Trump nor federal cops nor the National Guard is going to solve that problem. And don’t get up in my face and call me a racist. This is not just an inner-city racial problem, this is an American social problem.
But what to do about DC violence in the meantime? These kids want to act tough and carry guns; if they commit a crime, sentence them to the military, as happened in the Vietnam War era. If the parents won’t discipline them, let a drill sergeant do it.
Trump is right. D.C. is a dangerous city. I don’t like to walk its streets or ride its subway anymore.
Still, it will take society, not the National Guard, to make it safe again.
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I went to find (and steal), Mr' Dicken's opening line of "A Tale of Two Cities" and then read a little further and found the below quotes more apropos.
"France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.....
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;...."
After reading it, I realized I'm not the only literary thief lurking on the web.....seems he's not the first to want the "bad" people to bow to his God, nor that strove in fear as they aged where they once went with little thought.
One cannot help but wonder if it is merely the fears the old accumulate as they become more sedentary, more dependent upon what they read, say, and watch rather than actual facts.
I read Mr. Johnston's epistle with the complete and utter disgust that only one who is and was one of his "they"s could feel.
You cannot have Lord Trump's imperial power grab to occupy a city, without the same simplistic logic expressed by Mr Johnston here. One is the foundation of the other.
He mistakenly agrees it's necessary, and that "they" deserve it. He merely disagrees with the tactic, not the attack.
Yet both are wrong.
I find it amusing that suddenly he has come to Jesus in recognizing that it takes a community to raise a child, while ignoring that it was conservatives who studiously turned away from the last public person who stated that truth.
All I know is each of those "they's" are an individual. Of as much value as one who was on one of Mr. Johnston's sports team, in his church, starving in Gaza, betrayed in Ukraine, or caged in an ICE concentration camp.
We, as a society, have spent the last century trying to incarcerate our way to freedom. It hasn't worked, though we incarcerate more of our citizens than any country other than China. The only winners of the war on drugs have been the police-judicial-incarceration complex. And the cartels. And the Hollywood-media sideline that feeds off of the drama. A growth fed not on facts nor reason, but rather a self perpetuating hysteria and hype of which this missive is merely the latest example.
As we passively give away our freedoms in the hopes that somehow it will makes us what it cannot. Our Capitol is being occupied by the military. A military quick response force is being formed to respond to Americans that may protest the government. (At the same time this totalitarian klan is issuing pardons and monetary recompense with our tax dollars to those who actually did violently attack law enforcement but did it for them). Museums are being forced to control their content based upon whether it dissents from their worldview, taxes are raised or lowered based upon the same, treaties and laws ignored as well, schools, universities, legal representation, and constitutional liberties suppressed.
Oh and locking up the mentally ill and homeless.
You know, out of sight, out of mind - problem solved - right?
All so these fearful, ageing, and ignorant "good" people can be what they know in their hearts they cannot.
Younger, braver, safer.
Fact is, crime has been going down in DC.
If anything, as much as laws can - these policies were working, or certainly not making the conditions worse. Not if you rely on data rather than Fox.
Also, the data shows that if you want those children to get out of the legal system toward productivity, placing them in adult incarceration not only doesn't help, it increases the likelihood of recidivism. These laws gave judges discretion on the one hand, and recognized a statistically fact, that children do not have full maturity before age 25.
Again, we've tried institutionalization in the past. We've tried incarceration. Neither have worked. Remember when we deinstitutionalized the mental health sytem back in the 60's and 70's - we did so because of the abuses inherent in them, and with the expectation that treating people in the community would be cheaper and more effective.
We got half of that. It was cheaper. Because we did not ever create the community support system to replace institutionalization. Do you think we will do so now, in this time of deficits, and welfare for billionaires and the upper middle class? If you do, you're a special kind of special.
Our prisons are understaffed already. As are our police departments. Mostly thanks to conservatives. Especially DC, which has to beg Republicans in Congress for the support that other cities would automatically be able to provide themselves.
Not to mention that what set all of this previously planned occupation was not some injured child, it was one of Trump's DOGE buddies suffering a crime.
Today's conservatism. One law for me, one law for thee.....
This will not end well.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times......
This column sucks, but the brunch at Purple Patch in DC is spectacular.