We have, it seems, grown perversely accustomed to living alongside a species of civic leprosy. Every metropolis must have its “bad neighborhood”, every “world-class city” its no-go zone, every urban map a patchwork of warning labels. The advice to the visiting public — and, shamefully, to the locals — is always the same: Don’t go there. Stick to the good bits, pretend the other parts aren’t happening, and you should be ok. And if something happens, well, it is a city after all. What did you expect?
This is the polite way of saying: abandon your fellow citizens. Leave them to their fate. Allow millions of Americans to live in conditions you yourself would flee in an instant. And for what? So we can indulge the fragile self-respect of local politicians who preside over this shambles as though it were a natural disaster instead of the result of their own dereliction? So we can let the same city councils who can’t keep the streets from smelling like a bong at a freshman dorm lecture us about “self-governance”? So we don’t hurt the feelings of those destroying their own communities, and others desperate to leave them? Spare us.
Federalism is vital, but federalism is not a suicide pact. When the lowest rung of government fails, the one above it must assume the task. This is why counties take over towns, why states take over counties, and, in cases of prolonged and willful failure, why the federal government must take over a federal city. President Trump’s decision to deploy federal law enforcement to Washington, D.C. should therefore be welcomed, not wailed over. In a sane republic, such an intervention would be rare. But in a sane republic, the capital city wouldn’t require it.
And please, don’t try to tell me that crime in D.C. is not a problem. This is a city so violent, so dangerous, that it not long ago had to change the name of its NBA team from the Washington Bullets, not because the name was inappropriate, but because it was too appropriate.
I was in D.C. just days before Trump acted. A few Uber drivers summed it up: the city is beautiful, but crime is way too high. I was told I’d “probably be fine,” provided I didn’t walk at night, took a car everywhere, and avoided certain (read: “most”) areas. This is America! Where our cities have “no go zones”! By the way, I was staying right by the White House, not in some neglected district. Yet even there, walking a few blocks toward Ford’s Theatre in daylight, unsavory characters lined the sidewalks, implicitly warning me not to return that way later. Others were passed out on the street near the White House or directly in front of our hotel. The day I arrived, a shooting occurred outside another five-star hotel. Touring the monuments at night, I noticed how poorly lit many areas were, as if we were playing Russian roulette with our safety. It seemed the whole city relied on crowds to deter crime — since we are, of course, not allowed to defend ourselves — and had otherwise run out of ideas. In that moment, I would have felt far safer with a visible presence of armed men in uniform. And no, that is not ideal. Ideal is people policing themselves. But when they can’t, or won’t, then others must police them, for everyone’s sake.
This is not to demand or welcome a police state. It is simply a common sense recognition that high levels of crime demand high levels of policing. A police state exists when law enforcement exceeds lawbreaking, not when it meets the challenge of an emboldened criminal class. Those protesting the police presence should try organizing neighborhood watch programs in the very communities they claim to care about, if they truly believe enforcement is the problem. But what else can we expect from those who wanted to “defund the police”, making life easier for criminals and harder for the law-abiding, all in the name of some perverse vision of “social justice”?
When exactly do we admit that the last resort has arrived? Our cities have been deteriorating for half a century. Drugs became endemic in the 1960s, crime skyrocketed –not by percentage points, but by multiples and orders of magnitude — and it never returned to anything approaching normal. Crime rates fluctuate, but the baseline has remained stubbornly intolerable for over six decades. You would need a ninety percent dip in crime to restore these cities to what they should be. These cities are so dangerous, that if they were in foreign countries our State Department would issue travel advisories against visiting them. Yet, the only “solution” ever offered is to build shiny towers in the wealthier districts and push the rabble to the margins, until the margins push back. In California, and many other areas, they’ve already overrun the margins: tent cities blooming beside luxury shops, addicts slumped in the shadows of bank headquarters, the fetid stench of marijuana and vaping mingling with delivery-truck exhaust.
The “local control” purists who oppose intervention never seem to notice their argument amounts to letting the patient die on the operating table because they dislike the surgeon. They call it “home rule.” Then rule, why don’t you! If instead a community demonstrates it is unwilling or incapable of self-governance and self-control, then leaving them to their own devices is a death sentence.
And notice, by the way, the hypocrisy here: if there were a natural disaster, those same “local rule” politicians would be demanding immediate federal intervention. Whenever they can’t manage their finances, they demand federal money. But when it comes to crime, they suddenly demand to be left alone. Well, this is a disaster, and it is a result of their mismanagement, so the same principle applies.
We are told, and expected to agree, that this is simply how cities are. It is a lie. There is no law of nature requiring that downtown streets be open-air drug markets, or that public parks double as lunatic asylums without walls. We’ve focused here on D.C., but our criticism could extend to almost every major American city: Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, you name it. These cities should be the crown jewels of civilization: clean, safe, beautiful, humming with commerce and life. But they will not become that under the care of the people who presided over their ruin. In some cases, the rot is so deep that local government has become indistinguishable from the problem itself. At that point, intervention is not an assault on democracy. It is the very essence of democratic obligation. The first duty of government is to protect its citizens. If the locals can’t, or won’t, the feds must.
Washington may be the first test case. It should not be the last. The people in America’s most dangerous neighborhoods have been abandoned long enough. They are entitled to the same peace and security as anyone else. And if it takes federal muscle to give it to them, so be it, not because it is ideal, but because it is imperative.
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