DC is a wonderful amazing city, and you'd have to be a coward or a fool to be afraid of it.
In general crime everywhere is way down. But Americans are being cowed into fear. It's the phones, the social media, the drumbeat of insanity by the domestic Advanced Persistent Threat extremists & mal-archists & disinfoers. It's the police & their godforsaken union. It's social media always excited for salacious tales of the bad to get clicks.
Better said:
> Fear of crime: an unholy alliance between politicians that need a cudgel, local news that needs clicks, social media's ability to share viral anecdotal crime stories, police that need justification to exist, and the fact that police/surveillance tech is a multi-billion dollar industry, and racism.
Different topic, but I want to mention the National Guard keeps getting frelling hosed by the White House in this. Deployments are for 29 days, just shy of when long term deployment status kicks in, then the White House just redeploys them again. Incredible disrespect to the troops, beyond just that they have absolutely nothing to do in DC & no one wants them there. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-infuriating-29-day-orders/
I was in DC right before this fiasco, and I kid you not I spent the whole time thinking how nice and clean the city was, figuratively and literally.
What are you comparing DC to? Obviously not the actual statistics, but anecdotally what are you anchoring to? The city is more than fine. All of the southern "conservative cities" I've lived in (since this is how you're framing it) had same-ish to significantly worse stats and were generally sketchier.
Go walk around Houston, or New Orleans, or Midwest areas with opiate blight, of visit the nearby cities like Baltimore and tell me that DC has a problem. What planet are you living on if you think DC is in the bottom half of America. You must live a very privileged life to think that.
When I lived in DC a few years ago, it was absolutely a dangerous place. There were places you didn’t go after dark. The thing I liked least was the unpredictably of encountering an aggressive bum. Could be on the subway, in the mall, in a parking garage, on the street, where’s it going to be today? DC is the only place I’ve been that had that characteristic. It’s not dangerous everywhere, and not all the time, but pretending like it isn’t is ignorant, dishonest, or financially blessed to live above all that.
When I moved to the DC area at the end of the 1970s, I heard from acquaintances that it's not whether you will be mugged, it's when. My when turned out to be 1983.
I don't think that people think that way these days. Now and then there is a holdup in my neighborhood, but they are rare. There is porch piracy, sometimes cars get broken into.
I would be interested to learn of a city of comparable size that does not have "places you didn't go after dark".
