‘That’s not what creates safety’: Trump’s DC crackdown will do little to prevent crime, advocates say

Donald Trump’s hyperbolic portrayal of crime in major American cities, and his deployment of the national guard in Washington DC ostensibly in an effort to combat it, have reignited a decades-old debate about crime, violence and which policies and approaches can address it.

The US president has cited cities such as Oakland, Philadelphia and Chicago as examples of places overwhelmed by crime and violence. He has put forward an increased militarization of law enforcement, and more money and legal protections for police, as the most effective ways to address homicides and other violent crime.

But to violence prevention workers, the recent statements appeared made not out of care and concern for the lower-income Black and Latino victims who bear an outsized share of the nation’s crimes, but to undermine and dismiss the progress community groups have made.

And, the advocates argue, the administration’s emphasis on law enforcement and prosecution as the sole ways to stop crime will do little to stop the cycles of violence and property crime that these groups have faced through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

“The police are about response. But that’s not what creates safety,” said Aqeela Sherrills, a longtime community violence intervention leader in Los Angeles. “A lot of our urban communities have been war zones because they lack investment in infrastructure and programming. It’s really disheartening to hear the president of the United States put out misinformation.”

Sherrills began his career in violence prevention in Watts in the early 90s. Since then he’s been a leading force in several organisations that work intensely with the small portion of a city’s population responsible for the most violence in an effort to prevent crime and support victims of crime. Throughout his tenure, he said, he had seen the biggest successes in violence reduction come through training local non-profits, community leaders and officials on different violence community prevention models and then allowing them to build bespoke strategies from there.

Over the decades, various models have seen major successes. Some deploy violence prevention workers to middle and high schools. In other programs, they use probation officers as a conduit to connect with young adults who are carrying and using firearms illegally. Some programs send workers to hospitals after a shooting, in an effort to prevent retaliatory violence. Some models rely on a police-community partnership, others don’t involve police at all.

But most programs center on connecting with mostly young men and teenage boys whose conflicts spill out on to city streets, traumatizing entire neighborhoods.

This method has shown promise, research shows, In 2024 the Brooklyn community of Baltimore went a year without homicides after deploying a program called Safe Streets. And cities such as Oakland, Seattle and Philadelphia, where city leaders have invested in similar gun violence reduction programs, have seen drops in homicides when the programs were thriving, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s violent crime survey.

And while the reasons for the ebb and flow of homicides can’t be reduced to one program or strategy, those working to build these programs up have been fighting for credit and acknowledgment.

During the Biden administration, they got it. Their approaches finally found federal support with the creation of an office of gun violence prevention and federal dollars for community prevention groups working on the ground. In past years, programs have expanded across the US as more municipalities build their own offices of violence prevention.

But these insights don’t appear to inform the Trump administration’s approach, Sherrills adds.

“He’s not reading the data, he’s not looking at the trends and reports, it’s just more kneejerk reactions,” he said. “It’s shortsighted because they’re only speaking about one aspect of our criminal legal system.”

This most recent crime debate comes nearly four months after the Trump administration cut nearly $170m in grants from gun violence prevention organizations, including several groups founded and co-founded by Sherrills who have had to lay off several staff members, dealing a serious blow to critical summertime programming.

For small, upstart organizations this loss of funds puts their work in jeopardy, said Fredrick Womack, whose organization, Operation Good, lost 20% of its budget due to the April cuts.

Womack says he was dismayed to hear the list of cities that Trump singled out, because they are all cities with Black leaders who have invested in community violence intervention. The calls for increased police and potential military presences, he says, shows a disconnect between the halls of power and the needs of the people most affected by violent crime.

“How is the military going to provide support for victims when they need someone who’s going to be compassionate to what they’re going through?” He asked. “I know people want justice, but they also need support. They need healing and counseling.

“They won’t go into the projects and ask the people how life is going for you. But they’ll look at someone who lives in the hills who heard a gunshot two miles away last week and say: ‘We have a crime problem,’” he continued.

Womack founded Operation Good in 2013, and since then he and his small staff and gaggle of volunteers have worked with the teenagers and young men responsible for most of the city’s violence and given them odd jobs and taken them to civil rights museums so they can understand where they come from and gain a sense of community. Womack’s work has made a difference: in the years since the pandemic – which saw nationwide surges of gun violence – the homicide rate started to tick down, a change city officials have attributed in part to the work of community-based groups including Operation Good, and their collaboration with the police.

Community leaders also argue that not only will Trump’s approach be less effective, it’s not aimed at helping the people most affected by violence. During a 12 August press conference, Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host who was recently appointed the US attorney for DC, argued that Trump’s rhetoric about crime and his administration’s approach to violence in DC were done in the name of victims. Flanked by posters of mostly Black teenagers and children killed by gun violence, Pirro argued that policies including DC’s Youth Rehabilitation Act have only emboldened perpetrators.

“I guarantee you that every one of these individuals was shot and killed by someone who felt they were never gonna be caught,” Pirro told reporters.

And when reporters asked about addressing the root causes of crime and violence and the recent cuts to community-based programs, Pirro argued that her focus is on being punitive, not preventive.

For Leia Schenk, a Sacramento-based victim and violence prevention advocate, these sorts of sentiments, while common among conservatives, miss the point.

“It’s tone-deaf and an oxymoron. The root causes are why we have victims,” Schenk said. “In my experience [crime and violence] come from systemic oppression. Meaning if a family can’t feed their kids, they’re gonna steal, rob or commit some sort of fraud to just live and survive.”

Schenk has been working in the community advocacy space for more than three decades and in that time has seen the most successful approaches to youth crime, shootings and other forms of violence happen when schools districts, local mental and physical healthcare systems get a level of investment that matches the scale of the problem.

“We’re seeing the most success when we are supported – from schools to law enforcement to churches – their support allows us to do what we’re doing on a bigger scale.”

Despite the comments and moves from the Trump administration, Sherrills says the field of violence prevention will continue to thrive thanks to a strong foundation that was fortified in recent years due to federal support and increased support from philanthropic groups.

“We know that we’re in challenging times but it’s about doubling down on success and making sure we preserve the wins,” he said. “We’re going to continue to see violence trend down because of the work practitioners are doing in the field. Folks are tired of the killing and the dying and are looking for alternative ways to create better ways of navigating a conflict so that it doesn’t lead to violence.”