This post is a companion to yesterday’s about Trump’s lack of an end game in his supposed pursuit to make Washington great again.

I took some out of town visitors on a tour of Washington yesterday. They have been to Washington a few other times and they had seen the main tourist sites, so we decided to skip those and see parts of Washington that tourists normally do not get to.

We left our house about 10:30 and returned about 2:30. We stopped and had a sandwich in the middle (30 to 45 minutes).

I report the following: no signs of National Guard or additional law enforcement.

As I said, we stayed away from the government buildings and major museums and tourists sites. We hit residential areas such as Westmoreland Terrace, AU Park, Forest Hills, Georgetown, Glover Park, Cleveland Park, Massachusetts Heights, and Kalorama. We visited the National Cathedral grounds and the Basilica grounds. We saw the campuses of American University, UDC and Catholic University. We visited embassy areas. We were in Rock Creek Park and the Dupont Circle neighborhood. We saw no law enforcement.

It seems clear that if we had gone to the National Mall, to Capitol Hill, to the major monuments, we would have seen National Guard contingents. If we had crossed the Anacostia and gone to Wards 7 and 8, perhaps we would have seen or sensed something. But we did none of these things.

I saw polls today in the Washington Post which show general opposition to everything going on. Polling maybe in the 80-20 range, although I did not see this by area of the city. But it is also clear that crime, for some DC neighborhoods and some DC residents, is a major concern. Even so, however, only 18% of DC resodents think that the inceased enforcement makes them safer and over 60% says it makes them feel less safe.

I did look at some of the crime statistics reported by the 8 DC administrative wards, which have approximately equal populations. We live in Ward 3, a geographically large ward, which has very little crime. Yes, some property crime, but virtually no violent crime. The homicide level for Ward 3 through August 20, 2025 for this year, for example, is 0. Wards 7 and 8 together have shown over 30 murders already this year.

The property crime situation, which I assume includes carjacking, is different. Although property crimes are not high in Ward 3, they are quite high in Ward 2. Ward 2 includes the downtown area, the Dupont Circle area, and some of the highly touristed parts of the city. The property crime situation, according to the statistics I saw, is higher in Ward 2 than it is in either Ward 7 or 8. This is something, if true, that I did not know, and would lead to thinking that more enforcement is needed. Apparently, this is because Ward 2 contains the most commercial activity of any area of the city and commercial activity attracts property crime. I don’t know.

But it goes back to so much of what the Trump administration does. Because so much is done to obtain emotional responses, rather than to actually solve problems, the type of thought that you would want to go into an activity such as increased crime protection is not there. I don’t think that anyone has matched particular responses to particular crimes. It’s just bring out the National Guard, and have the FBI ignore their other more important responsibilities and do night patrols in DC neighborhoods.

And then of course, there is ICE, involved in a very different kind of crime control, but one which gets conflated with violent crimes and property crimes. And unfortunately, the targeting of people speaking Spanish or with an accent and whisking them off the streets without knowing anything about them and without providing them with any semblance of due process, sometimes taking them, holding them incommunicado without an opportunity to inform family members as to where they are, or to obtain counsel, as outrageous as it is, is simply getting lost as one aspect of making DC safe again, something on which it has little, and maybe no, effect.

As all this activity is going on, are you being distracted from other things, such as the shakeup at all American museums, which are too woke, as can be proved by all of the negative information being provided on slavery, for example? That is the latest, so add it to the list.