As President Donald Trump declared Washington, D.C., a crime-ridden wasteland in need of federal intervention and threatened similar federal interventions in other Black-led cities, several mayors compared notes.
The president’s characterization of their cities contradicts what they began noticing last year: that they were seeing a drop in violent crime after a pandemic-era spike. In some cases the declines were monumental, due in large part to more youth engagement, gun buyback programs and community partnerships.
Now members of the African American Mayors Association are determined to stop Trump from burying accomplishments that they already felt were overlooked. And they’re using the administration’s unprecedented law enforcement takeover in the nation’s capital as an opportunity to disprove his narrative about some of the country’s greatest urban enclaves.
“It gives us an opportunity to say we need to amplify our voices to confront the rhetoric that crime is just running rampant around major U.S. cities. It’s just not true,” said Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Georgia, and president of the African American Mayors Association. “It’s not supported by any evidence or statistics whatsoever.”
After deploying the first of 800 National Guard members to Washington, the Republican president is setting his sights on other cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, California, calling them crime-ridden and “horribly run.” One thing they all have in common: They’re led by Black mayors.
“It was not lost on any member of our organization that the mayors either were Black or perceived to be Democrats,” Johnson said. “And that’s unfortunate. For mayors, we play with whoever’s on the field.”
The federal government’s actions have heightened some of the mayors’ desires to champion the strategies used to help make their cities safer.
Some places are seeing dramatic drops in crime rates
Trump argued that federal law enforcement had to step in after a prominent employee of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was attacked in an attempted carjacking. He also pointed to homeless encampments, graffiti and potholes as evidence of Washington “getting worse.”
However statistics published by Washington’s Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped there since a post-pandemic peak in 2023.
Chicago…