Could you say a few words on the impact of land area to the discussion?

Once you concede on that, could you say what homicide level requires a police state as a reaction? It would appear to be within a factor of two of the present numbers, but I can't work out where the line would be.

> You can't lie with numbers that are easily provable.

Climate change would like a word with you.

Land area doesn’t matter

Population does matter somewhat but not really in this case. If you’re invading a city because crime is high it only makes sense to do if it’s high in absolute numbers; otherwise you’re not really having much impact.

Also half of DC actually lives in MD and VA.

Why does land area matter exactly?

It doesn't, at all. It's born from the same complaint that, say, NYC outvotes the rest of the state although it's only a tiny portion of the total size.

Because it permits such nonsensical statements such as "France has more murders per year than London" (therefore London is safer by comparison QED).

When you can draw arbitrary borders, you can make the numbers mean whatever you want.

Crime counts are normalized to crime rates with respect to population, not land area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

And you'll see that Washington D.C. doesn't make the top ten for rates of any of the major violent crimes (murder, rape, etc.) nor for the "Total" violent crime.

One of the biggest errors in the interpretation of crime statistics is improperly using the overnight resident population, instead of the better daytime population, as the denominator. This error is often committed in cases as various as St. Louis and Berkeley, as well as DC.