Your proposal is that the military response is primarily to combat homeless encampments in DC, that this is appropriate, and that this won’t happen elsewhere because this problem is unique to DC?
It's not just a military response, but also federalizing the police force. He can go after both the homeless encampments and the gangs. This is appropriate because:
1) Americans deserve a capital city that's at least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego, which have homicide rates one-third or one-quarter as high as D.C. over the last decade--even excluding the COVID-era spike in homicides.
2) The orderliness of a city is primarily an issue of policing and incarceration. You don't need to pass national gun control, or address "root causes"--just take gang members off the streets and put them in prison.
3) The problem isn't unique to D.C., but D.C. is an outlier because (a) the aesthetics of D.C. are important because it's the nation's capital; and (b) Trump has express statutory authority to federalize the D.C. police force under the DC Home Rule Act. DC thus can serve as a testbed for Republican policing in a major city, most of which won't elect Republican mayors.
> least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego
Neither of those cities are very safe and orderly. Didn’t 3 people just get killed in Austin yesterday? DC is also tiny compared to the outlying cities that surround it. Baltimore anyone?
This is probably just more distraction to get the news stories away from those Epstein files.
Pre-covid, Austin’s homicide rate was around 4 per 100k. San Diego’s is typically under 4x DC’s never got below 14 per 100k (in 2012) and spiked up to 40 per 100k in 2023.
DC is 20% more populous than Baltimore. The nearest city larger than DC is Philly, 140 miles away.
I left China in 2016 and now I live in Seattle. I lived in Austin for a summer in 2001 (the summer before 9/11) and it was…hard, I had to evict a squatter from my sublet, the property crime was high and people skulked around in the morning looking through everyone’s trash. Anyways, not sure if your argument is that it is better or worse now, but definitely not a place I want to live in ever again.
There are 6.3 million in the greater DC area, DC is a small part of what goes on in that region.
I’m not a democrat. Help me steel-man your point.