Low Expectations, High Body Counts: How the Left's Apathy to Urban Crime Betrays Black Americans More Than Any Intervention Could

In its reflective reaction to everything Trump and Republican, the left continues to display its casual racism in ways that would be embarrassing with even a smidgen of self-awareness. They lack self-awareness because they always unquestioningly start with the conclusion that anything they support is good. Relevant to this piece, the left has come out in opposition to the Trump administration fighting crime--especially if it is primarily perpetrated by and against black urban residents. They also support our national museums that promote "whiteness" as an intrinsic bad. President Trump has dispatched the National Guard and temporarily taken over policing in Washington, D.C.--in the nation's top 10 highest murder rates. He has also begun removing DEI and what he calls divisiveness from the Smithsonian. It is worth noting that the Smithsonian portrays hard work and rational thinking as aspects of this inherently bad whiteness. With this in mind, the left's approach to crime and criminals often goes unspoken.  But when you look closely, it seems apparent they accept crime and criminality as inherent to "blackness." The left is often accused of promoting the racism of low expectations. What they are doing in opposition to fighting crime seems worse. Their expectations of black Americans may not just be low, they may be subhuman.

To illustrate the power of rejecting such low expectations, consider a real-world example from child behavioral intervention--one that mirrors the transformative potential of Trump's approach in D.C. There is a special summer camp 2 hours north of New York City named Camp Ramapo. It has a long history of giving children with difficult behaviors fun and successful summers. The camp trains young and inexperienced staff in a behavioral intervention model that helps to build relationship and positively impact behaviors almost immediately. There are a few interesting parallels between Camp Ramapo's approach to campers who need extra support and President Trump's successful intervention in D.C.. That intervention has resulted in decreased crime and an unprecedented two weeks without a reported murder. The most obvious parallel is staffing. While matching Camp Ramapo's 1:1 counselor to camper ratio might be impossible for policing DC, simply increasing the number of law enforcement officers aiding the understaffed force has proved to be enough. The most important parallel is reflected in the fact that the intervention is happening at all.

The first intervention in Camp Ramapo's model seems self-evident and is more difficult to apply consistently than one might expect; Believe in the child. Children who use anger as a protective tool are very effective at inspiring that in the adults working with them. Children used to failing promote the expectation of failure. Camp Ramapo's approach is to determine that every child wants to be successful, regardless of how they act or what they say. The important work to convey that belief starts before the campers arrive. An important part of showing belief in the child is giving them the safe, clean, and well-organized space they deserve. To be effective, a counselor starts with the belief that every child wants to be successful and the idea that it's just a matter of building relationship and utilizing the right interventions to help them to success. Many of the campers in the program are used to the opposite. 

The unwavering belief in potential--despite outward behaviors--directly counters the left's acceptance of dysfunction as inevitable, much like the high standards applied in high crime urban settings. Similarly, President Trump's DC intervention started with the belief that it was not only possible; it is what the residents of the city want and deserve. It seems strange to suggest that two weeks without a reported murder is the result of setting high expectations for the city. But relative to the status quo--and that it has not happened in the history of crime reporting in the city--it is sadly true. The loud, mostly white voices protesting the deployment of the National Guard accuse the president of authoritarianism and overreach on a made-up problem. "Crime is falling," they say. 

When you consider from where it has fallen, the claim obviously needs more context. Washington, D.C.'s murder rate in 2024 was 27.3 per 100, 000, higher than Mexico City or the capitals of many developing nations. In the predominantly black Wards 7 and 8, the murder rate was 59.21 per 100, 000 and 86.8 per 100, 000 respectively. Clearly, the opponents of the president's deployment don't live in those wards. What is worse, their protests reveal they don't seem to care about those who do live in those wards. According to the protestors, in stopping the elevated risk of murder faced by those residents, the President is exhibiting racist authoritarianism.

This irony underscored a deeper projection: by framing Trump's safety measures as racist, critics reveal their own reluctance to hold black communities to the same standards of security and success. In many ways, Trump's critics are expressing the racism they project on Trump. They accuse him of racializing crime interventions when it is they who have introduced the idea of race. In doing so, they acknowledge there is a racial element to confronting urban crime without explicitly stating that connection, the disproportionate criminality of urban black communities. In portraying the administration's attempts to confront crime as an attack on their city, Trump's critics on the left implicitly make the criminals as important to their constituency, if not more than the victims of their crimes. It seems hyperbolic to suggest that the left prefers criminals over their black voters until you consider that there has been much more protest over confronting criminality than for the violence that has threatened the residents of our cities for decades.

Consider the status quo they find more acceptable than the intervention. Just prior to the announcement of the takeover by the Trump administration, a young member of the DOGE team was assaulted by a group of teens. Within days, a Biden-appointed judge had ordered their release. While the assault didn't prompt the intervention, the disposition of the judge represents a perspective on crime which most likely did. Following the death of George Floyd numerous urban areas, D.C. among them, began promoting the idea that fighting crime required a degree of sympathy for the criminal. In 2022, the districts' proposed Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022 "clarified" the definitions of several crimes, lowered maximum penalties for crimes like carjacking, added an increased focus on intent, as well as a focus on equity and over-criminalization. The RCCA was vetoed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the council overrode her veto. The act was overturned by Congress. Biden signed the congressional disapproval despite the apparent support by his administration:

Although never implemented, the RCCA represented the leniency towards crime preferred by the DC council and numerous urban leaders across the country. The predictable rise in crime in the wake of this attitude reached such extremes that Ward 8 Councilor Trayon White held a press conference in August 2023 calling for the deployment of the National Guard to confront the violence. The most significant response to the rise in crime came from Mayor Bowser. In January 2024, she introduced the Secure DC Omnibus Amendment Act of 2024. It proposed the opposite of the RCCA by increasing penalties for crimes the RCCA sought to reduce, creating provisions for increased pretrial detention of minors, and providing for monitoring of high-risk offenders.

Yet, even as policies like the Secure D.C. Act began to address the leniency, public reactions--captured on social media--highlighted a growing divide between elite critics and everyday residents. There has been an interesting social media dynamic throughout the federal intervention. As it began, there were loud, mostly white voices decrying the authoritarianism of the administration, and more quiet optimistic voices hoping it would be effective. This evolved into a growing number of videos of black and white D.C. residents showing appreciation for being able to walk in places they avoided just weeks prior. At the same time, a Department of Justice employee became so enraged by the police presence he assaulted an officer with an overpriced sandwich. As residents from ostensibly safe neighborhoods began sharing their accounts of street violence, it illuminated the degree to which protestors were simply whistling past the graveyard. They were dismissing the violence they risk to condemn the president for an intervention that helped to stop murder in even the most dangerous wards. This dynamic is even more pronounced in the reaction to the idea of a similar intervention taking place in Chicago.

There is a growing number of social media videos from black Chicagoans inviting President Trump to give Chicago the D.C. treatment. A similar intervention is unlikely because the president has constitutional power over D.C. that he lacks for other American cities. Deploying the National Guard in Chicago would require a request from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who opposes the deployment. A common theme in the media is that the president is only focused on cities with black mayors, a sentiment shared by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Accepting this argument as true, one must still ask why so many cities with black mayors find such a high murder rate among black residents acceptable. One reason may be an ideological opposition to policing. Mayor Johnson frustrated host Joe Scarborough with his unwillingness to answer whether additional police without the president's intervention would make Chicago safer. Is it more racist to allow your city to average more than a murder a day of predominantly young black residents or to stop those murders? I would suggest the former. The media notices that Trump condemns cities run by black mayors for their high crime and violence before they note that cities with black mayors consistently have high crime and murder rates. As Mayor Johnson continues to condemn the president, Chicago experienced 54 shootings and 7 deaths over Labor Day weekend. If the mayor sees the cure for violence as worse than the violence itself, it illustrates that the well-being of residents is not his priority. It also explains his low approval ratings. The residents of Chicago know they deserve more.

This disconnect between mayors like Johnson and their constituents exemplifies a broader pattern among urban leaders, who prioritize other concerns over the safety black residents clearly crave. Consider what it says about how they view their constituents that urban city leaders express more concern for the impacts of high incarceration rates than they do the high rates of crime.  Either they view their black resident as prone to criminality or more sympathetic to criminals than safety in their lives. Regardless, they see crime and decay as inherent to city living. The power of Trump's intervention in DC is that it reveals the degree to which crime and decay have long been accepted choices. High murder rates in Chicago, Baltimore, and Memphis predate Trump's arrival on the political scene. The accusations of racism for wanting to address crime seem unhinged since Trump recognizes that urban black residents both want and deserve higher standards for their cities more than their often black mayors do. This is an example of the ways in which the contemporary notion of anti-racism promotes pathology as implicit to blacks.

The contemporary notion of anti-racism starts with the idea that Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech is wrong. It's not about character, effort, or achievement; it's about the color of a person's skin. It is the ideology and false history of the 1619 Project, which frames US history as a binary of black victimhood and white oppression. It suggests that blacks alive today need special dispensation, like DEI programs, to overcome the harms of slavery and Jim Crow because personal agency is not enough to overcome the unmoving barriers and detritus of the past. It engenders pity and the lowest of expectations for black Americans because slavery and Jim Crow are the only aspects of black American history that Trump critics find relevant. Thus, the President's attempt to move the Smithsonian past the simplistic binary of black victim and white oppressor is seen as attempting to erase slavery rather than place it in it's fullest context. The history of slavery is much more complicated than the black and white binary. Slavery was an unquestionably sick institution and an important part of the American story. What is more important is the struggle for the nation to live its ideals, the war that ended slavery, and how the formerly enslaved created stability and their futures with their own hands. 

This fuller historical view clashes directly with modern institutions like the Smithsonian, which redefines success traits as racially exclusive.  According to the Smithsonian's since discarded 2020 racial guidelines, qualities like rational thinking, hard work, self-reliance, and deferred gratification are attributes of whiteness. Were rational thinking, hard work, self-reliance, and deferred gratification not attributes of the formerly enslaved in reaching stability? If not, how did they ever survive? These are attributes of success that belong to no particular race. 

In a rare moment of clarity, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has started to appreciate the federal intervention's success. She even invites more support now. Wards once plagued by nightly terror are reclaiming their streets. This proves high expectations are not racism. They are respect. Yet this stands in stark contrast to her Democrat colleagues. They show disgusting apathy. They shrug off the urban death toll as inevitable. It fits their pitying worldview. They let young black lives bleed out. At the same time, they decry any cure as authoritarian. It's time for Democrats to confront their casual racism. They must recognize that subhuman expectations do more harm than any imagined oppression. They should choose better. They must embrace the agency of black communities by providing the security they deserve. Only then can we build cities where hard work and safety are not luxuries for the few. They are the birthright of all. We must demand the success every American deserves. No matter their color.