Someone was shot outside my building. It feels like a macabre rite of passage

Washington: Hello from a pungent Washington DC, home of the sewage-filled Potomac River.

A few days ago, I joined an unfortunate club – Australian correspondents in Washington DC who have come all too close to a fatal shooting.

I had only been in my new apartment a week when an email lobbed from building management notifying me of an “emerging situation across the street” involving police and emergency services.

The incident occurred at 2.15pm on a Friday, while I was at work. By the time I got home that night, all traces of the emergency had disappeared.

But the next day, I learnt there had been a fatal shooting. The DC Metropolitan Police said the victim was 22-year-old Nehemia Jamaane Williams, a local, who was found inside a car and died in hospital from his injuries. Police were appealing for information. No arrests had been made.

Welcome to the neighbourhood, I guess. My new place is only a few blocks from where Matthew Cranston, a former Washington correspondent for The Australian Financial Review, witnessed a shooting inside a crowded McDonald’s in September 2022.

And that was just metres from where a 15-year-old boy was shot dead a few months earlier, near the apartment building where my predecessor as North America correspondent, Farrah Tomazin, lived.

Those incidents occurred amid a post-COVID crime wave that rocked the US capital and many American cities. It is partly why President Donald Trump sent the National Guard into Washington last year, even though rates of violent crime were already falling.

The fatal shooting outside my building – in broad daylight – was the seventh homicide in DC this year. The eighth came a few nights later in the Navy Yard neighbourhood south of Capitol Hill. And yet, there has been a 68 per cent decrease in the number of homicides so far this year compared to last year.

“We have one of the safest cities in the world,” Trump said on Wednesday (Washington time) at an event for Black History Month, as he welcomed to the stage Felicia Cook, whose grandson was killed during a violent encounter in 2017. “Now you can walk down the street, and you have nothing to fear.”

Trump regularly overstates the case with grand statements about how Washington now has “zero” crime, and how once-empty restaurants are now filled to bursting. “You can be with your child, with your loved one, with your lover,” he said last month. “Your lover’s not going to be killed any more, so you can act like a real lover.”

It’s difficult to take those statements seriously when someone’s shot dead on your doorstep. But, broadly speaking, we have to – because violent crime is down dramatically, not just in DC, but around the country.

The Council on Criminal Justice reported homicides were down 21 per cent in 2025 from 2024, based on data from 35 major US cities. That was 922 fewer homicides.

Furthermore, the council said that when national data is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that the murder rate will drop to 4 per 100,000 residents.

“That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record,” the council said.

The White House chalked this up as a major victory for Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda, compared to what it called Joe Biden’s “defund the police era”.

In reality, violent crime fell across the board, not just in cities where Trump mobilised the National Guard or cracked down on illegal immigrants. Homicides fell 40 per cent in Washington, but they also fell by the same proportion in Denver and Omaha, and by more than 20 per cent in cities from Atlanta to Dallas to New York.

This is all a good thing. Trump may be overstating his contribution to a trend that was already underway when he took office, but he has also rightly seized on the fact that most Americans want and need relief from violent crime.

Of course, a serious attempt to reduce that harm would involve changing the country’s gun laws. But that is not on the cards.

One thing you come to understand quickly in the US is the complicated nature of attitudes to guns. It’s not just redneck Republicans who cling to their weapons: last week in Washington, my group had a long debate with an otherwise very progressive bartender who was set on her right to bear arms.

DC is much safer than it was last year, and the year before that, and that’s welcome. Thanks, Mr President. But let’s not pretend all is fixed.

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