Almost every ranking of the greatest TV dramas in history has ‘The Wire’ at or near the top.  The HBO series portrayed cops – some clean, some corrupt – trying to fight crime in drug-infested Baltimore, along with junkies and killers, politicians and crime victims.  The show introduced viewers to the term ‘juking the stats,’ meaning a concerted effort to create fake crime statistics to please the top brass and City Hall.  ‘Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear,’ declared one character. ‘You juke the stats and majors become colonels.’

The Wire came to mind when Donald Trump deployed National Guard troops in Washington, just 40 miles to the south.  That inspired cacophonous caterwauling among Democrats and TV hosts who claim the move is ‘fascistic’ and unnecessary because DC is already safe.  Mayor Muriel Bowser insists that violent crime has dropped by 27% over the past year.

But is Washington really getting safer?  Or is someone cooking the books in our nation’s capital?  The feds are investigating after a top police official was suspended for allegedly altering crime data.  You know, ‘juking the stats.’  The boss of DC’s police union says the official numbers are ‘preposterous,’ adding that ‘crime is ubiquitous in every quadrant of the city.’
 
But one particular crime, the ‘Big M,’ is not very conducive to statistical manipulation because dead bodies are hard to hide.  DC’s murder rate, while lower than the bad old days of the 1990s, is double what it was a dozen years ago.  Washington has the fourth-highest homicide rate of any major U.S. city; if it were a state, DC would lead the league in murders.
 
But right after the federal takeover, Washington had zero homicides for a full week, something that hasn’t happened since March.  And that killing-free week came in the dog days of August, when murders tend to be far more frequent.  It can’t be proven that the lack of murders and the lives saved are a direct result of Trump’s actions, but it does seem like a reasonable deduction.  Carjackings and other violent crimes are also way down in recent days.
 
Will any Democrat applaud that fact?  Will any left-wing analyst on MSNBC or CNN give the president a smidgen of credit?  Nah.  They’ll continue to rail against the ‘dictator’ in the White House because, as we know, if Trump did it, it’s gotta be wrong. Dead wrong!