As hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops descend on Washington as part of President Donald Trump’s public display of force against crime in the nation’s capital, the president and his allies have increasingly directed their ire toward the city’s juvenile crime laws.

More than two weeks after a 19-year-old former DOGE staffer was allegedly assaulted in DC by a group of teens, the president suggested that decades of Democratic leadership in the district were to blame for a system that seems to let violent juvenile offenders off the hook.

Youth arrests reached a post-pandemic high in 2023, before falling the following year, according to DC government statistics . But from January 2025 until the end of June, DC Metropolitan police had arrested juveniles a

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