A Republican senator said that he doesn’t wear a seatbelt when he’s driving in Washington DC so he can act more swiftly if he gets carjacked, adding further fuel to repeated rhetoric by the Trump administration that crime is on the rise in the US – despite statistics openly indicating otherwise.
Markwayne Mullin told Fox News on Wednesday that he avoids buckling up, violating local traffic ordinances, so he can “exit in a hurry”.
“I’m not joking when I say this. I drive around in Washington DC in my Jeep and, yes, I do drive myself. And I don’t buckle up. And the reason why I don’t buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to, they can raise their eyebrows at me, again, is because of carjacking,” he said.
While praising Donald Trump’s controversial deployment of national guard troops to the US capital and a federal takeover of the Metropolitan police department, Mullin said he wouldn’t wear a seatbelt in other cities controlled by Democrats. But he said he did wear a seatbelt in other jurisdictions.
“If you look at car theft only, if Washington DC was a state, Washington DC would be three times higher than any other state,” Mullin said. “And we’re talking about a city. And we’re comparing it to full states.”
Mullin’s comments come as a war of words over Washington DC’s crime rate continues between supporters and opponents of Trump’s order, which he casts as an effort to combat record-breaking levels of violent crime.
“Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever,” Trump said on Monday. “They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”
But official statistics tell a different story. Homicides dropped to 187 in 2024 from 274 a year earlier – the highest number since 1997. This year, there have been 100 homicides to 12 August, according to the New York Times, a slight decline over 112 to the same date last year.
But at 39.1 per 100,000, the homicide rate in Washington DC, according to data compiled by the Igarapé Institute in 2023, is not as bad as Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Cape Town, South Africa; Kingston, Jamaica; Caracas, Venezuela; or Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Trump has claimed that “the number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled”. The city’s dashboard shows carjackings rose for three years, from 2020, before declining in 2024.
This year, through 9 August, there were 188 carjackings compared with 299 during the same time period in 2024, and compared with 607 in 2023, a police spokesperson told PolitiFact. Car theft also dropped 25% from 2023 to 2024.
