Trump’s Tactics on Crime

A month after President Trump called in federal troops, he says there’s “no crime” in the nation’s capital. But his administration is finding more of it than ever.

You’d be forgiven for thinking a crime wave began precisely when troops arrived. Arraignments — hearings at which arrested people learn what charges they face — have dragged into the wee hours of the morning. One marathon session this month finished after 1 a.m.

This is the president’s vision for law enforcement. He believes that crimes should be prosecuted to the max, and that low-level violations set a permissive climate for nastier ones. So National Guard troops have helped officers book Washingtonians for open alcohol containers, vandalism and shoplifting. (They’re also headed to Portland to quell protests and Memphis to fight more crime.)

Here’s the thing about a crackdown: You find as many crimes as you look for, and the Trump administration is looking more assiduously than before. Arrests have surged, and witnesses are reporting fewer crimes. But that doesn’t mean more people are getting punished. Today’s newsletter is about the new tough-on-crime tactics and how they’re working.

A controversial idea

President Nixon in 1971 called drug abuse “a national emergency.” To stop it, Nixon’s successors rolled out mandatory minimum sentences, parole restrictions and no-tolerance policing strategies. Local politicians from both parties promised to lock up more criminals. One prominent theory that took shape in New York City, called “broken windows,” held that jailing window smashers, turnstile jumpers and public drinkers would discourage more serious offenders. Proponents said harsher clampdowns meant less crime.

Policymakers brought these ideas to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. Trump, too, is a believer. When he took office this year, his attorney general issued a memo telling prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offenses.”

But it’s not clear these strategies work. There’s little evidence that minor neighborhood disorder inspires more crime, according to a recent analysis of nearly 100 studies. And cities that singled out low-level offenses in the 1990s and early 2000s enjoyed no special reduction in crime rates. Violent crime fell in those places, but it fell almost everywhere. Save for a pandemic spike, violent crime has been declining for decades.

Meanwhile, the conviction rate for misdemeanors plummeted — from 46 percent to 8 percent over four decades in New York City, for instance. Prosecutors spent time and money building cases they wouldn’t win. All the while, prison populations boomed as cities arrested and incarcerated far more Black and Latino men.

A reprise

Now the broken-windows approach is back, and already the same challenges have emerged in Washington:

• Grand juries. Locals are refusing to indict suspects in what they see as trivial cases. Jurors wouldn’t indict a man arrested for throwing a sandwich at an officer. And they declined — three separate times — to indict a woman detained while taking a video of ICE agents.

• Discretion. At the Trump administration’s insistence, Washington prosecutors are pursuing significantly more cases now, including the tough-to-win cases they normally jettison. One arraignment docket this month included 122 arrests — overwhelmingly misdemeanors — and the government decided to prosecute every one. For context, the government declined to prosecute more than 40 percent of cases in D.C. last year.

• Trials. Defendants are often entitled to a jury trial for more serious charges. They can request one when they are tried for assaulting a police officer, and that has been a particularly common charge during the crackdown, defense lawyers say. (Usually, prosecutors charge those cases as simple assaults to avoid lengthy and unpredictable jury trials; 95 percent of trials last year didn’t use juries.)

• Disparate impact. The crackdown has focused overwhelmingly on young, Black men, The Washington Post reports. Black parents are fretting about their children’s safety and initiating tough conversations about racial profiling.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump might have declared victory in D.C., but courtrooms tell a more nuanced story. Throwing the book at every offender has clogged the courts and made it harder to win convictions. The same may soon happen in Memphis.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

• Congressional leaders said Trump would meet with them today. The deadline to avert a government shutdown is tomorrow.

• A shutdown could be a big moment for Russell Vought, the White House budget director, who is pushing to increase presidential power. Read about his plans and how he’s executing them.

• Mayor Eric Adams dropped his re-election bid for mayor of New York, five weeks before Election Day.

• In going after his foes, Trump is setting a precedent that could haunt his allies, Peter Baker writes.

• Trump, who campaigned against “foreign wars,” is sending warships to Venezuela. The World, the Times’s new international daily newsletter, explains why. (It debuted today: You can sign up here.)

Diplomacy

• In India, a generation of students pinned hopes and family savings on careers tied to U.S. visas. Trump’s $100,000 fee on the H-1B visa is upending their lives.

• Russia pushed hard to swing an election in Moldova, a small but strategically important country that borders Ukraine. But the pro-European party won, preliminary results show.

• Fears of U.S. surveillance have driven Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to empower a secretive spy agency.

Other Big Stories

• Two more bodies were pulled from the burned remains of a Latter-day Saints church in Michigan, bringing the death toll to at least four. A man crashed a pickup truck into the building on Sunday morning and then opened fire on worshipers.

• Typhoon Bualoi tore into Vietnam’s central coast. The storm has now killed at least 22 people.

• A stowaway was found dead in the wheel well of a plane in North Carolina after it arrived from Europe, the police said.

OPINIONS

Why is your flight delayed? Blame government shutdowns for preventing the Federal Aviation Administration from training enough air traffic controllers, Binyamin Appelbaum writes.

Here’s a column by David French on James Comey’s indictment.

The World’s 50 Best List released its inaugural list of the best restaurants in North America. No. 1 was a refined Korean tasting-menu spot in New York. But other picks reflect a surprising turn to the casual. Here’s the top five:

1. Atomix New York City

2. Mon Lapin Montreal

3. Restaurant Pearl Morissette Jordan Station, Ontario

4. Smyth Chicago

5. Tanière3 Quebec City

More on culture

• The British pop star Lola Young canceled a second show in three days after collapsing onstage at a music festival in Queens on Saturday.

• The ticket sales for “One Battle After Another” are solid. But its costs are still making movie executives nervous.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …