Why Did They Print This?

In the Hartford Courant this morning they published an editorial on the perceived crime in Chicago.

Residents of D.C. deserve safety as much as we do in state and everywhere

By Bill Keane

September 3, 2025

On a 2018 vacation trip to Chicago I entered a taxi around 10:30 a.m. with the intention of going to Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica.

Photographing church interiors is a hobby of mine and since this exquisite structure made a cameo appearance in “The Untouchables” movie I was excited about the prospect of capturing images of my own.

Telling the cab driver my intended destination, he said with a hint of incredulity, “Do you know where you’re going?”  Timidly, I handed him a piece of torn paper with the address, and he said, “No.  Do you know where you’re going?”  Clearly, it seemed I didn’t.  The object of my interest was in South Chicago, a locale I knew little about.

Perceived crime is worst than the crime. Fact: there are high crime areas within cities, there are some blocks in Hartford that I don't want to travel in at night but the overall crime in the city is down. Do we label a city just because of a high crime area in a city? Crime in Chicago is down and decreasing but do we send literally in the troops?

Recently, the deployment of National Guard soldiers in our nation’s capital has made a positive impact on crime there, acknowledged by the district’s mayor.  Guns have been seized, murders are down, and daily car-jackings have dropped like a stone. Only a stubborn fool who doesn’t care about everyday citizens would deny the obvious good bestowed upon the residents of Washington DC.

Yes, but at what cost? The Washington Post reported;

• Reservations at restaurants fell by as much as 31%, and tourism organizers began canceling events due to low demand.
• Destination DC reports that 41 conferences have backed out of Washington for 2026, which could cost the city over $50 million in lost revenue.
• 18% of D.C. residents reported feeling safer, 61% reported feeling less safe, and 20% said it made no difference.

Businesses are now hurting in DC, the troops where placed not in areas of high crime but in areas where they are most visible leading to concerns about optics over necessity. Of course guns have been seized, murders are down, and daily car-jackings have dropped like a stone... of course it is literally now a police state. But what do you expect from a police state?

AP News had this about the guard deployment,

Like Carter, people would like more law enforcement resources, but they distrust the motives behind the surge and how it has usurped the authority of the mayor and local officers. And while they acknowledge crime is more serious here than most other areas of the district, it is nowhere near the levels of three decades ago, when the D.C. National Guard worked with the Metropolitan Police to address the violence.

This year’s homicides in the district, as of Friday, were at 104, a 17% decrease from 126 as of Sept. 5 last year. But, more than 60% of them are in the two wards that are almost exclusively east of the Anacostia River, including 38 in Ward 8, according to the Metropolitan Police Department crime mapping tool. That proportion is about the same as it was in 2024 when there were 187 homicides citywide for the year. One of the most notable murders was a double homicide that left two teens lying dead on the street and a third man wounded.

[...]

He, like others, questions why Trump decided to federalize the city when violence is present virtually everywhere, including in rural areas where drugs and economic hardships have created fertile ground for lawlessness.

Reuters wrote that,

Several thousand protesters marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to demand that U.S. President Donald Trump end the deployment of National Guard troops patrolling the capital city's streets.

[...]

Protesters at the "We Are All D.C." march, including undocumented immigrants and supporters of Palestinian statehood, chanted slogans denouncing Trump and carried posters, some of which read, "Trump must go now," "Free DC" and "Resist Tyranny."

"I'm here to protest the occupation of D.C.," said Alex Laufer. "We're opposing the authoritarian regime, and we need to get the federal police and the National Guard off our streets."

It is all optics to justify an authoritarian regime. The bottom line: this is having a chilling effect on tourism—discouraging visitors, hurting local businesses, and stoking concerns about militarization and democracy. For what? The crime rate per 100,000 is lower than Republican cites but Trump chose Washington DC because of it being a Democratic city and it is highly visible!