Donald Trump recently placed the Washington D.C. police department under federal control. This unprecedented move resulted in hundreds of National Guard troops descending on the city, where they began tense standoffs with local Washingtonians. The governors of six red states have joined in, sending in their own National Guards.
Trump justified his actions with figures highlighting D.C.’s murder rate compared to other world capitals. Said figures stress that D.C has a worse murder rate than places like Bogota or Islamabad. And according to his admin, things are just getting worse.
There’s already been breathless coverage on this topic — including the murder statistics underpinning Trump’s central reasoning. Although he’s probably wrong that crime in D.C. is getting worse, Trump’s figures comparing D.C. homicides to other cities are factually correct.
But as some have rightfully pointed out, comparing crime statistics across different countries is a pointless exercise. America has a uniquely terrible gun violence problem. So, highlighting D.C.’s homicide rates against other world capitals says more about our nation than Washington D.C. as a city. Consider that this chart comparing American homicides to other G8 countries bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s visuals.
The logical next step to contextualize D.C.’s violent crime is to compare it to other U.S. cities, all of which suffer from that uniquely bad gun violence problem. A couple of publications have attempted to do this, but frankly these “analyses” seem slapped together or lacking proper context.
Most publications have focused on debunking Trump’s claims that D.C. crime is getting worse. Few have meaningfully assessed his claim that things are uniquely bad in D.C. So let’s do a proper statistical comparison of Washington D.C. to other American cities. In the process, we can see if the governors that sent their National Guards to D.C. have other things to worry about at home.
This article will focus on homicides as a proxy for violent crime. Click below to skip ahead:
- What is a city?
- Murder Rate using Metro Area
- Murder Rate using FBI-defined Urbanized Area
- Republican Governor Hypocrisy
What is a city?
This is a surprisingly difficult question. Trump’s team appears to calculate its statistics using D.C. city limits, which captures roughly 675k people. But comparing statistics across city limits can be misleading because American cities often sprawl beyond their limits.
For example, in Virginia, cities have fixed limits and cannot expand. As a result, my home city of Richmond has just ~225k residents within city limits despite having a metro area covering over 1.3m people. That means that fewer than 20% of people who call themselves “Richmonders” actually reside within city limits.
To deal with this issue, researchers typically use metropolitan (“metro”) areas when comparing different cities. Metro areas better capture what we think of when we think about a particular city.
Murder Rate using Metro Area
We can use the FBI’s homicide database to look at homicides across these metro areas [1]. The D.C. metro area is referred to as the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area, encompassing some 6.2 million people. To smooth single-year anomalies, I look at average murder rate from 2021 to 2024. I also only consider other “large” metro areas with at least 100,000 residents. The result paints a much different picture than what the White House is saying:
The Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area had ~6.4 murders per 100k residents from 2021 to 2024.
A full 25% (97 cities) of American metro areas have a higher murder rate than Washington D.C.
Although metro area is a better comparison unit than city limits, it definitely isn’t perfect. Metro statistics are often obscured by suburbs. For example, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area contains wealthy suburbs in Fairfax that dilute its murder rate and aren’t really relevant to this discussion. I want to note that most metro area include similarly wealthy suburbs, so this issue is valid for all cities and not just D.C.
Nevertheless, let’s try to correct for this issue.
Murder Rate Using FBI-Defined Urban Area
The FBI crime dataset is compiled by taking statistics from police forces across the nation. Luckily for us, the FBI classifies whether these police departments are in a metro area’s “urbanized area” or not. We can use this to filter out wealthy suburbs that may otherwise dilute a city’s murder rate. If we look only at these urbanized areas, we see the following:
Here Washington D.C. has a murder rate of ~19.1 per 100k residents, which is closer to the figures being thrown around in the news right now. But still, it’s far from the worst city in America:
Using FBI-defined Urban Area, 18 large U.S. cities have a higher murder rate than Washington D.C.
Republican Governor Hypocrisy
In a show of what can only be described as political theater, a number of Republican Governors have dispatched their National Guard to D.C. to participate in Trump’s crackdown. In total, the governors from six states have done so (LA, MS, OH, SC, TN, and WV). But incredibly, most of these governors have cities in their own state with worse murder rates than D.C. These cities have murder rates up to 2x worse than D.C.
The chart below shows the 8 cities in these states that have higher murder rates than D.C. Notably, Jackson, MS does not appear to report its statistics to the FBI, so it is omitted despite probably having a worse murder rate than D.C.:
The call is coming from inside the house. If these governors were truly concerned about violent crime, they’d deal with their own cities instead of wasting taxpayer dollars to send troops hundreds of miles away to D.C.
Many GOP Governors have sent their National Guard to Washington D.C. to deal with its “crisis” despite governing over cities that have worse murder rates
Conclusion
Thanks for reading. I live close to D.C. and have many friends there, so I’ve found this whole ordeal frustrating. It’s not the safest place, and action definitely needs to be taken to reduce gun violence. But that will only be accomplished through evidence-based interventions. Not authoritarian crackdowns involving troops from some Louisianian town 1,000 miles away.
As a palette cleanser, enjoy this song that I’ve been playing a lot recently. If you liked this article and want to read more like it, don’t forget to subscribe below!
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Notes:
- [1] The FBI’s crime database relies on agencies reporting their own crime statistics. The FBI claims that over 95% of the American population is covered by this database, but I noticed some key gaps. For example, Jackson, Mississippi, which has a notoriously high homicide rate, is missing from the data.