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While announcing plans to send National Guard troops into the country’s capital, the Trump administration spread falsehoods about crime in Washington, D.C., as well as legal system measures like Illinois’s bail reform.
During his remarks at the White House, Trump claimed that “every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster.”
“Somebody murders somebody, and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out,” Trump said. “We’re going to end that in Chicago.”
In 2021, the Illinois state legislature passed the Pretrial Fairness Act, which eliminated cash bail in the state and replaced it with individual assessments to determine a person’s pre-trial conditions. This new system means that “people who pose a threat to their community will not be able to purchase their release,” Allie Preston, a senior policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, wrote in a report on the legislation.
The overwhelming majority of people involved in the criminal legal system live in poverty, “[a]s a result many people are held in jail on bail amounts as low as $250 or $500,” she wrote.
“People often must rely on family members and friends to supply bail money, thus spreading the economic impacts across families and communities,” she continued. “It is not uncommon for people to have to forgo paying for electricity, food, or rent to afford bail.”
After Trump’s remarks, the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, a coalition of organizations that championed the state’s bail reform law, sent out a press release stating that “violent crime has actually significantly decreased since Illinois implemented the Pretrial Fairness Act.”
“Thanks to Governor Pritzker and our state legislators, Illinois is now safer because money is no longer the primary factor determining who returns to the community and who is jailed while awaiting trial,” the group said.
Despite Department of Justice data that shows crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low, Trump and members of his administration claimed that crime was rampant in the city, particularly offenses committed by children.
“Our secret weapon here in D.C. is [U.S.] Attorney [for the District of Columbia] Jeanine Pirro, one of the toughest prosecutors and a former judge,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters. “She is going to be talking about juvenile crime, how it’s out of control here.”
Pirro said she sees “too much violent crime being committed by young punks,” and called for harsher punishments for children, contrary to research that shows incarceration causes catastrophic harm to kids and does not make communities safer.
“[O]verwhelming evidence [shows] that incarceration is an ineffective strategy for steering youth away from delinquent behavior and that high rates of youth incarceration do not improve public safety,” according to a report from The Sentencing Project. “Incarceration harms young people’s physical and mental health, impedes their educational and career success, and often exposes them to abuse.”
In order to justify its calls to gut reforms that keep kids out of the adult legal system, the Trump administration misrepresented the prevalence of crime committed by children in the nation’s capital.
In an email to subscribers, Fwd.us, a criminal justice reform group, said: “With the White House announcing the extraordinary step of deploying the National Guard to D.C. to ‘address street crime’ despite crime rates being at historic lows, some of the loudest talking points about youth crime are about to dominate headlines again.”
“Here’s what the evidence says,” the group continued. “Youth crime is at a historical low. Fewer young people were arrested last summer than in any of the last forty non-pandemic years, and given the declines in crime seen this year, that will probably go down again in 2025.”
Eduardo Ferrer, a law professor at Georgetown University and policy director of the Juvenile Justice Initiative, told Courthouse News that, “youth arrests are well below where they were pre-pandemic.”
“If the federal government wants to help our capital community thrive, it should restore Medicaid cuts, allow D.C. to spend the tax revenue it raised and make us the 51st state,” he said.
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