This just shows that you've never been to DC and you're just a lib trying to cover up crime (I'd say it's natural for you people)
What are you comparing DC to? Obviously not the actual statistics, but anecdotally what are you anchoring to? The city is more than fine. All of the southern "conservative cities" I've lived in (since this is how you're framing it) had same-ish to significantly worse stats and were generally sketchier.
Go walk around Houston, or New Orleans, or Midwest areas with opiate blight, of visit the nearby cities like Baltimore and tell me that DC has a problem. What planet are you living on if you think DC is in the bottom half of America. You must live a very privileged life to think that.
I don't think that people think that way these days. Now and then there is a holdup in my neighborhood, but they are rare. There is porch piracy, sometimes cars get broken into.
I would be interested to learn of a city of comparable size that does not have "places you didn't go after dark".
In general crime everywhere is way down. But Americans are being cowed into fear. It's the phones, the social media, the drumbeat of insanity by the domestic Advanced Persistent Threat extremists & mal-archists & disinfoers. It's the police & their godforsaken union. It's social media always excited for salacious tales of the bad to get clicks.
Better said:
> Fear of crime: an unholy alliance between politicians that need a cudgel, local news that needs clicks, social media's ability to share viral anecdotal crime stories, police that need justification to exist, and the fact that police/surveillance tech is a multi-billion dollar industry, and racism.
https://bsky.app/profile/mguariglia.bsky.social/post/3lxskib...
Covering a Pew study on crime rates & peoples perception of crime, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
Different topic, but I want to mention the National Guard keeps getting frelling hosed by the White House in this. Deployments are for 29 days, just shy of when long term deployment status kicks in, then the White House just redeploys them again. Incredible disrespect to the troops, beyond just that they have absolutely nothing to do in DC & no one wants them there. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-infuriating-29-day-orders/