When D.C. Leaders Can't Acknowledge Their Failures To Curb Crime
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You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Balmach. Over the past week, you may have heard about the story coming out of Washington, D.C., regarding the movement.

of two of its vaunted sports franchises. The Washington Capitals and the Washington Wizards are going to go across the Potomac River under the auspices of owner Ted Leonsis and take over a 70-acre area on the river across from the city in Alexandria, right by the Washington Reagan National Airport and a new metro stop in

in order to essentially provide a new and upgraded stadium experience, along with additional offerings to the various local communities, including restaurants and residencies, a new concert arena, and a number of other amenities that are supposed to be on offer.

And this is something that is being criticized by city managers, by major figures at ESPN, by the mayor of Washington and others. And it's something that I think is pretty illuminating in terms of the degree to which

Our national media, our local media even, plays games that ignores the kind of local experience that is actually happening on a day-to-day basis. One that leads to things like sports franchises believing that they can no longer stay downtown in cities that are run according to progressive policies.

D.C.'s mayor is Muriel Bowser. She is currently in her third term. She has been reelected over and over again with very little opposition and most of it coming from the left.

She's someone who I believe is one of the dumbest people who's in politics just generally in America as a whole. Chris Wallace, our former colleague, once said that she was one of the smartest Democrats running any government. I don't believe that to be the case.

Muriel Bowser has been someone who's presided over a total degradation of the D.C. living experience, mostly in the form of rising crime. Since 2020, the police force in D.C. has lost a net 500 officers.

She has seen spikes in carjacking that are completely unprecedented, more than doubling, in fact, the previous year's record over and over again, including juvenile repeat offenders, which is a major problem with this. You may have seen the stories regarding some of these juvenile offenders who, even as young as 13, wielding stun guns in order to try to steal cars from Uber Eats drivers and the like.

She's also been someone who has presided over an increase in violent crime. If you don't consider carjacking to be violent crime enough, it's an amazing experience in terms of the level to which DC has fallen off from being a place that people wanted to live in a city that people were attracted to. And they fell safe, safe in downtown to being one that has frankly a, a murder rate that is astonishing. They passed two,

200 deaths in September of this year, the earliest point in a year in which they have passed that number since 1997. Along with Baltimore, D.C. is just a hub for violent crime, homicide, carjacking, and a number of other major crimes. And yet, it's also a place that seems to have a chip on its shoulder whenever someone brings this up, criticizes it,

that points out the simple facts of the case. And that's what we saw play out in the national media when it came to the movement of these two team franchises. The Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals are two franchises that have been closely associated with the rebirth of downtown D.C. when they were relocated there in the late 90s.

under the auspices of Abe Poland and then, you know, a co-founder of AOL, Ted Leonsis, who owned the Capitals. He since purchased the basketball team as well. It was part of a major rebirth of the Chinatown area in D.C., making it more safe and something that, frankly, would attract a lot of suburban families, families that would come there, go downtown, go to a game, etc.

Go to a restaurant before the game, go to something after the game if they were single and younger. And that's the sort of thing that we saw, you know, really participate in the comeback of the Chinatown area in a major way. New restaurants, new venues, new opportunities for people and also lots of employment and other things as well.

Unfortunately, in the wake of the pandemic, what we saw in D.C. was that unlike many other major cities that had a spike in violent crime during the George Floyd pandemic era experience that then retreated in the wake of its dismissal, D.C. did not experience that. Instead, they've only continued to have all the lines move in the wrong direction.

One of the things that is notable about this is that there is such a degree to which families moving out of cities is a contributor to this problem. The under five population fell by more than 3,200 families or about 8% between April 2020 and July 2022. DC putting in line with a number of other cities which saw young kids moving

and families with young kids moving out of them because they simply didn't feel safe. The sixth largest decline in population among the 25 largest cities since 2020. Homicide and violent crime also way up in D.C. The latest data from the city's police department shows more than a one-third increase in homicides year over year, a two-thirds increase in robberies, a near doubling in carjackings, as I mentioned earlier,

And when you think about this, comparing to the national picture, an association of police chiefs from the largest cities and counties in the U.S. and Canada, which gathers data about this, found that in the first three quarters of 2023, D.C. had the one of the highest year over year increases in homicides in the country. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.

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So the point of all of this is that none of this is really invented. It's not something that's just like a Republican fiction about the way that DC is run or the picture when it comes to homicides, rape, robbery, aggravated assault.

All situations where, you know, D.C. far outpaces cities like Long Beach, Oakland, NASA, New York, Chicago, El Paso, you know, etc. This is all a situation where, frankly, D.C. has made its bed and it is unwilling to sit in it.

Here's what the D.C. mayor, Muriel Bowser, had to say at her press conference responding to the move from Ted Leonsis, the Wizards and the Cavs, to Virginia. Here's how she talked about the second question that she got about the crime problem. Well, I would characterize what they said to us, and I happen to agree with it, that our experience with crime is kind of a blip.

It's a phenomenon and we can look back over the last several years and see a lot of contributing factors. But we will drive it down. So I don't know that they characterize it that way to us. I did have the opportunity to hear part of Ted's comments earlier in what I was struck by was when he said he had goosebumps going and having the opportunity to build from scratch.

So if, you know, I would say a lot about about that comment. In no way is this a blip. It's a continued problem and it's one that the mayor is not solving. In fact, you've seen multiple bills come out of the D.C. City Council, even more progressive than Mayor Muriel Bowser, and try to lower the kinds of ramifications, the kinds of penalties for carjacking and a number of other things that

that were supported, by the way, by idiots in D.C. and by a lot of different people on the left and in the left libertarian space, if they would like to continue to operate under the assumption that

that penalties don't actually have anything to do with the decisions that people make. More power to you. There's absolutely no evidence that that's the case. And I look forward to you complaining about this and asking and calling for cops when you go through this whole experience. Look, at the basic level, D.C. has given back 20 years of progress when it comes to crime, when it comes to reducing homicide, reducing robbery,

when it comes to reducing violent crime, they've just gone backwards. The homicide totals are near historic highs. The level of carjackings, insane. And the fact that we have at the same time a level of truancy from high school students in particular that is astonishing, almost 60% of high school students being chronically absent, you know, is something that is clearly associated with this.

DC is a city that is not being run well. It's being run by progressives who are more interested in defending the fact that they have Black Lives Matter Plaza painted over with that slogan than

Then they do, you know, taking care of their actual citizens, protecting their people, making sure that it's a safe place for tourists and for politicians and for all the people who visit to feel. And especially for people who want to go in and see a game, go to a game at night and not have to fear about their family coming out at the end of it. Unfortunately, that's not the D.C. that we have.

Instead, we have a DC where the mayor, as much as she can foment about the latent racism and all the other things involved with moving a couple of franchises across the river to Virginia.

doesn't even know where the trains go when it comes to the metro stations. Like, I'm no, look, I'm the D.C. mayor. I'm not an expert on their crime, but that traffic is notorious. So people know about it. And I think which lines go to that station? Blue and yellow. Blue and yellow.

So every line goes to gallery place, right? Red, blue, orange, and yellow. Yellow and green. Is that right? I think that's right. Green and yellow.

Green and yellow, blue and orange and red. Silver. So it is clearly you can come from all points of the region and people have to to that station. Glenn Youngkin in Virginia and Mark Warner and a number of other Democrats and Republicans on both sides are meeting this moment with open arms. They want to have these franchises in Virginia.

I'm not somebody who is in favor of paying money to billionaires to build stadiums or, you know, support their efforts and moving teams and the like. I certainly would have a lot of problems with this if I was a legislator. But it's also something that I completely understand. And the fact that D.C.

as a city is going to take on the attitude of just this is completely motivated by racism and politics and all these other things, as opposed to the very real problems of crime in the area, of crime in downtown D.C. that is not being dealt with because of the progressive principles, the defund the police policies that so many of these different politicians have embraced over the past several years.

is just the height of absurdity. It's absolutely ridiculous. And so, because of that, we're likely to see the Wizards and the Capitals in Northern Virginia. Whether that's something that's good for the area or not, I don't know. But it's something that's good for those teams because it means the people who are going to see them don't have to walk out of the stadium at the end of the night and feel like they're going to get mugged.

I'm Ben Domenech. You're listening to Fox News Radio. We'll be back with more next week. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

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