Where Crime in Washington Is Bad, Residents Question Trump's Crackdown

They call his federal takeover of the city's police an attempt to push black people out

- Clyde McGrady

WASHINGTON — In the Congress Heights neighborhood in the southeast corner of Washington, DC, where there have been several murders and more than a dozen robberies so far in 2025, residents have greeted US President Donald Trump's promise of liberation from crime with a mix of skepticism, suspicion and outright derision.

It is not that they do not believe crime is a problem in the nation's capital. They know it is.

They just do not believe the President cares — at least not about them. If he did, they asked, why are residents hearing of federal agents roving the whiter areas of 16th Street Northwest but less so in their largely Black neighborhood? Why are National Guard members posing with tourists at the Washington Monument?

"If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of DC residents, I would see the National Guard in my neighborhood," said Ms. Karen Lake, 62, a lawyer who has lived in Congress Heights since 2017, in the far eastern corner of the diamond-shaped district.

"I'm not seeing it, and I don't expect to see it. I don't think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in southeast," she said.

Mr. Trump might have found a more sympathetic audience in the distant southeastern quadrant of the city, far away from the National Mall, the White House, or the restaurants and clubs of 16th Street and 14th Street, where a young employee of the Department of Government Efficiency was recently beaten in an assault that raised the city's criminal profile to presidential level.

In neighborhoods such as Congress Heights and Washington Highlands, where the District of Columbia abuts Prince George's County, Maryland, the city's Black working class struggles with the twin challenges that have diminished the ranks of what was once, when Washington still had a majority-Black population, affectionately called Chocolate City.