President’s push on a city long targeted by the unhinged American right

DC’s reputation as crime-ridden is at once true and not true. To the south and east, there are intractably poor and unemployed neighbourhoods, racked by drugs and largely populated by African Americans. The city has only recently recovered from the damage the black middle class suffered when rioters destroyed a number of commercial strips after the assassination of Martin Luther King jnr in 1968.

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The rest of the city – called “North West” – is the part frequented by government employees, lobbyists and tourists. Some of these parts are virtually crime-free. You don’t see many muggings outside the FBI headquarters. I lived in an enclave tucked in between the National Portrait Gallery and the National Archives, just off the National Mall. My friends and I could wander home down the Mall from the Kennedy Centre at all hours with no concern at all about safety.

My crime-related memories from those years include a Democratic representative, Patrick Kennedy (yes, one of those Kennedys), being high on drugs and running his car into a Capitol barrier in the wee hours. He was escorted home and eventually given probation. I daresay no African American DC resident would have had a similar action disposed of that way. Another crime: A Homeland Security official was caught with child pornography. But I have no memories of friends being mugged or burgled.

DC does have problems, many of its own making. Famously, long-time mayor Marion Barry was nabbed by the FBI while smoking crack with a sex worker in a hotel in 1990. He was removed from his position, only to re-emerge and be returned to office. In the decades since, the occasional reform mayor has worked hard, but the corruption and fecklessness of the city’s political class sometimes seems intractable.

All that said, Trump’s deranged rants this week are misguided even by his standards. In the past 10 or 15 years, the city has made great strides; The New York Times reported on Tuesday that incidents of violent crime had dropped by half in the district since 2011. But Trump knows his lies will inflame his base’s long-held prejudices.

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So what will happen? We’ll see FBI agents and the National Guard providing local police protection they are not trained to provide in a largely black city that has been doing fine on its own. Trump’s intervention promises more of the chaos and distraction he has used so effectively to distract attention from his most dangerous policies. The losers? As is too often the case in America these days, the poor and the disadvantaged – those who can least afford it.

Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.

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