BYRON YORK: D.C. and the Trump-is-bad-but-he’s-right effect

There’s something interesting going on in the continuing controversy over President Donald Trump’s anti-crime initiative in Washington, D.C. When Trump first announced the move, saying crime in the city is “out of control,” many Democrats and their media allies denounced it with the argument that crime is in fact falling in the district, perhaps even to its lowest point in 30 years.

Now, after two weeks of heightened law enforcement and rising arrests, more and more voices are conceding that Trump is right, that crime really is a serious and ongoing problem in the district. Some of those voices are still opposed to Trump, but at least they are now admitting there is a big problem.

A recent Wall Street Journal report featured Ebony Payne, a neighborhood commissioner in northeast Washington who spends her evenings reviewing messages from neighbors “reporting assaults, smashed car windows, break-ins, shootings, and teenagers threatening children or even dogs.” Payne told the Journal that she and her neighbors “are frustrated by the city’s inability to respond to ‘out of control’ crime” and that when they heard of Trump’s initiative, “some residents’ first reaction was relief.”

Payne was so relieved that she has been disappointed that she has not seen a greater police presence in her neighborhood. “We all wanted something to be done,” she said. “It’s just really unfortunate that we are in this situation where there’s a sledgehammer on our city because we couldn’t get a handle on our crime problem.”

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was born and raised in Washington, the daughter of a D.C. policeman. In a recent column, she wrote that, “City officials and many liberal residents are outraged about Trump’s painting D.C. as a hellscape and flooding the zone with law enforcement and troops.” A moment later, she added, “It is also true that many D.C. residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don’t feel safe.”

Dowd herself doesn’t. She carries pepper spray, she said, because “I feel more wary walking around the city. It’s disturbing to ask someone to unlock the Claritin at CVS because the police didn’t lock up the smash-and-grabbers.”

The column includes a conversation with former prosecutor Elie Honig, now a CNN legal analyst. What Honig told Dowd is a classic of a type of commentary you might call Trump-is-bad-but-he’s-right. “Yes, Trump is hypocritical and scattershot on public safety,” Honig told Dowd. “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.”

Recently, the profoundly anti-Trump publication The Atlantic published an article saying that Trump “has the wrong answer for how to fix” Washington crime. No surprise there. But the news was the headline: “Trump Is Right That D.C. Has a Serious Crime Problem.” “The nation’s capital really does have a longstanding and profound violence problem that will not improve without deliberate intervention,” The Atlantic said.

All of this is music to the ears of the D.C. Police Union, which represents 3,200 officers and has supported the Trump effort since the beginning. “We completely agree with the president that crime in the District of Columbia is out of control and something needs to be done with it,” union chief Greggory Pemberton said when the plan was rolled out.

On Aug. 18, the union tweeted what it said were numbers on D.C. crime in the last week, under the Trump program, versus seven days earlier. They were robbery, down 46 percent; assault with a deadly weapon, down 6 percent; carjacking, down 83 percent; car theft, down 21 percent; violent crime, down 22 percent; and property crime, down 6 percent.

That looks good. But of course, one part of the ongoing debate about D.C. crime is the reliability of statistics released by the Metropolitan Police Department. There have been serious allegations, and one senior officer suspended, about cooking the books — in this case, downgrading felonies into misdemeanors that will not show up in the serious crime statistics.

The alleged downgrading is part of the reason the union and others in the city say that the crime problem is worse than Trump’s opponents insist. Let’s hope the newest numbers, reflecting the Trump effort, are accurate.

But at least for the moment, fewer and fewer are claiming that crime is going down or that it is the lowest it has been for 30 years (that, apparently, was the creation of the outgoing Biden Justice Department). That’s a positive development; it was always slightly ridiculous for Democrats to argue that crime in the district is just not serious enough for federal intervention. Now, at least, there is some agreement that the problem really exists.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Email him at byork@washingtonexaminer.com.