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A couple months ago, President Trump deployed the National Guard into Washington, DC after an attempted carjacking and assault left a staffer from his administration injured near Capitol Hill. The White House claimed the goal was to curb crime and make the city safer. Trump supporters praised it. Trump critics denounced it.
What almost no one wanted to talk about was the real problem underneath all of this. Crime. The everyday violence that has been baked into American life for decades and that Dems still refuse to confront honestly.
America Has a Crime Problem. Stop Pretending It Does Not.
Cleveland has roughly 365,000 residents. In the early 2020s it recorded between about 100 and 180 homicides a year, which works out to roughly 30 to nearly 50 murders per 100,000 residents depending on the year. That is consistently among the highest homicide rates of any major city in the United States. Recent years have seen some improvement, but the city still sits in the high tier of violent places in this country. Ideastream Public Media [ [link removed] ]
Berlin, a city of about 3.8 million people, generally records a few dozen homicides a year. In 2024, Berlin police counted just over 50 homicide offenses, which is roughly 1 to 2 murders per 100,000 residents. Berlin [ [link removed] ]
Tokyo, the largest metro area on the planet, has a national context where Japan’s homicide rate is around a quarter of a murder per 100,000 people. Even as Japan has seen small increases in crime, it still remains one of the safest countries on Earth compared to the United States. MacroTrends [ [link removed] ]
Honolulu, with a city population roughly three times Cleveland’s and about a million people on the island of Oahu, usually records homicides in the tens, not the hundreds, each year. Its per-capita homicide rate is far below Cleveland’s and far below the worst American cities. Honolulu Civil Beat [ [link removed] ]
So when we compare cities on a per-capita basis, which is the only honest way to do it, American cities are much more violent than cities in Western Europe or East Asia.
Yes, homicide rose during the pandemic years. Yes, national violent crime has trended down again since 2022 and 2023. In 2023 the national homicide rate fell from its recent peak and has continued to move downward in 2024 and 2025. That is real. Bureau of Justice Statistics [ [link removed] ]
It is also real that the United States still sits far above its peer countries. Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada and other wealthy nations typically sit between about 0.3 and 1.5 homicides per 100,000 people. The United States has hovered somewhere between 5 and 7 for much of the last decade, with some cities blowing past that. East Asia Forum [ [link removed] ]
Some American cities have homicide rates that live in the same neighborhood as some of the most violent cities in Latin America and South Africa. That is not “vibes.” That is math.
America has a violent crime problem. Full stop.
You do not need a spreadsheet to understand the next part.
Crime in poor neighborhoods almost never produces fast, serious political action. Crime in affluent neighborhoods almost always does.
If violence stays boxed into neighborhoods without money, without heavy homeownership, without organized political power, it gets speeches and hashtags. When shootings, carjackings and robberies spill into high-income areas, suddenly everyone discovers that crime is bad.
If Bay Village or Olmsted Falls [ [link removed] ], two suburban affluent cities outside Cleveland, had Cleveland’s [ [link removed] ] murder rate, Bay Village [ [link removed] ] would see roughly 5 to 8 murders a year, and Olmsted Falls would see 3 to 5 murders a year, instead of the zero they typically report.
Imagine the outrage in Olmsted Falls or Bay Village if those communities experienced 15-24 murders every three years.
That has been true for decades. A lot of people in poor neighborhoods have been begging for help for years. No one listens until someone with a title or a donor list catches a bullet or loses a car.
Bureau of Justice Statistics [ [link removed] ]
The National Guard Deployment
Troops on American streets should always make you nervous. History has shown us again and again that when leaders decide they can deploy soldiers domestically at will, the outcome is rarely good for the people. Kings did it. Dictators did it. Presidents have abused that power. So it makes sense that the instinct for many people is to recoil when the National Guard rolls into Washington, DC.
But here is the part almost no one wants to say out loud. If you live in a neighborhood where gunshots are a weekly soundtrack, where carjackings happen in broad daylight, where walking home is a daily gamble, seeing more uniforms and hearing fewer gunshots does not feel like tyranny. It feels like a breath of air. You can still worry about civil liberties and be honest about the fact that safety matters. For people in high crime neighborhoods, safety is not an abstract concept or a Twitter argument. It is life or death.
The Guard is not a real solution. It is not something you want permanently. But it can act as a reset, a hard reset, in places where violence has been allowed to grow for decades while politicians posture, filibuster, and argue about whose talking point sounds nicer on the local news.
A responsible city leader would treat a National Guard deployment the same way you treat a burst pipe. First, turn the water off. Stop the immediate crisis. Then, while everything is calm, fix the structural problem. When the work is finished, turn the water back on. There is no virtue in letting the leak destroy the whole house while you debate the purity of your repair technique.
If I were a mayor of a city drowning in violent crime, here is what I would do. I would set a defined, public time period. Say… six months. Not indefinite. Not open ended. Six months. During that time, every rule of engagement for the Guard would be strict, monitored, and public. Any member of the Guard who hurt or harassed a resident without cause would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Then I would call in my police chief, my social service directors, community organizers, neighborhood watch groups, religious leaders, youth program leaders, mental health workers, and anyone else who has been begging the city for support. I would say:
“We have six months to get our house in order. Crime is down because the Guard is here. It will not stay that way. When they are gone, we need a real system ready to stand on its own.”
This is the golden window that cities almost never get. A moment of calm inside a long storm. The job of a mayor is not to go on MSNBC or Fox News and yell about Trump. The job is not to perform outrage for donors. The job is to take advantage of rare breathing room and build something permanent so your residents can walk their streets without fear.
That means addressing the things that actually drive crime. Mental health. Addiction. Youth program collapse. Lack of transportation. Housing instability. The absence of credible messengers in violent neighborhoods. The shortage of local police who know the communities they patrol. Bad policy choices that stack the deck against people trying to climb out of poverty. All of it.
You cannot fix those problems in chaos. You need a stable period to refocus and rebuild.
After six months, the Guard leaves. Full stop. No attempt to extend their presence. No attempt to normalize military force in civilian life. The city takes back control because it has prepared real solutions.
But here is what I do not hear in the suburban, affluent conversations about this deployment. I do not hear a single word about the safety of the people who live in the poorest neighborhoods. I do not hear concern for the families who have been dealing with shootings, break-ins, drug activity, and fear for generations. I hear outrage about the idea of troops downtown, but nothing about the decades of violence in communities that have begged for help and gotten empty speeches instead…by people that don’t even live downtown. People that are just comfortable tweeting from their safe, suburban homes.
People only care when crime spills into places with money. They care when it touches donors. They care when it inconveniences professionals and political staffers. They care when it disrupts brunch. If it does disrupt brunch, the mayor runs out and signs a Flock camera contract [ [link removed] ] to track everyone coming in and out of the city.
But when it crushes poor neighborhoods, year after year, no one in power gives a damn. Suddenly the moral outrage disappears. Suddenly the nuance comes back. Suddenly the conversation shifts to excuses instead of solutions.
Our cities are not fine. They are not safe simply because crime dipped in the aggregate. On a global scale, American cities are more dangerous than almost every major city in Europe, Japan, South Korea, or Australia. Some of our cities are as violent as the most dangerous parts of Latin America and Africa. This is not partisan. It is the truth.
So let us stop pretending that deploying the Guard is the apocalypse, while ignoring the fact that families in poor neighborhoods have been living in fear for decades. Let us stop comforting the wealthy first and abandoning everyone else. And let us stop the dishonest argument that things are basically fine when every statistic and every lived experience in these communities tells you the opposite.
Do I think the National Guard is the long-term answer. No. Can it be a stopgap that allows cities to address issues. Maybe. But damn it, have the real conversation of crime and find some damn bold solutions. We can not pretend that our cities are safe just because we do not personally experience the danger.
Crime is real. Violent crime is worse in the United States than in almost every developed nation. And the people screaming the loudest about troops on the street are usually the ones least affected by the violence itself.
We need real solutions. We need honesty. We need urgency. And we need leaders who care about more than the safest zip codes.
What We Have Seen When Uniformed Presence Increases
In several recent cases, a larger uniformed footprint has produced short term drops in violent crime. In Washington, DC in 2025, violent crime fell during the first nineteen days after National Guard and federal agents were deployed compared with the same period in 2024 and with the five year average (CBS News, Feb 2025). Cities that were targeted or threatened with deployments, including Memphis, Chicago, and Portland, also saw violent crime and homicide rates decline after federal attention increased (Axios, Jan 2025). A similar pattern appeared during Operation Legend in 2020, when surges of federal officers in Chicago, Kansas City, and Albuquerque coincided with short term reductions in shootings and homicides (U.S. DOJ Operation Legend Report, 2021).
These examples do not justify long term militarization. They show a consistent empirical pattern. A sudden increase in uniformed enforcement often suppresses violence temporarily. Research groups have noted the same effect. The R Street Institute has documented that visible enforcement increases perceived detection risk, which can deter opportunistic violent crime (R Street Institute, 2023). The reductions are temporary unless the city uses the window to rebuild local capacity, but the short term impact is real. Across multiple cities and multiple years, crime has declined concurrently with Guard or federal deployments.
Final Point
The core truth does not change.
America’s violent crime problem is real.
Troops on the street are not a real answer.
But pretending our cities are “basically fine” is its own kind of lie.
We need local leaders who will admit the scale of the problem, use whatever breathing room they can get, and build lasting solutions that make neighborhoods safe in the same way rich neighborhoods are.
Crime is not partisan. Safety is not partisan.
If Congress, statehouses and city halls keep treating crime as a talking point instead of something in their job description, families in the same neighborhoods that have been ignored for generations will keep paying the ultimate price.

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