Welcome to the three martini lunch.

Grab a stole next to Greg Carumbus of Radio America and Jim Garrity of National Review.

Three martini's coming up.

Hey, so glad you're with us for the Monday edition of the Three Martini Lunch.

Jim Garrity is back today.

And Jim, we start with a story that honestly, I didn't think we'd ever have.

A good martini of, hey, D.C. crime is way down.

And I mean, way down.

And there's going to be a lot of explanations for that.

National Guard coming out last year, actually prosecuting offenders.

But according to current estimates, Washington, D.C. is on a pace for 42 murders this year.

The lowest since at least 1930.

Two years ago, it had 274 murders, and carjackings at this point are also down by 44%.

Now, we should point out it's April, so there's eight months for everything to get screwed up here.

But it seems like D.C. has been put on track due to a number of smart decisions, some of which were

controversial at the time that seemed to be paying off.

Greg, I think we talked about this, you know, early in the year. And on the one hand, you know,

they had like only two murders in the first couple of weeks of the year. And on the one hand, that's terrific news. I also pointed out that people may recall, to use a technical term, it was butt cold for the most. And crime rates tend to go down in really cold weather because nobody's out on the streets. So it's very hard to snatch a purse if there's nobody out walking around with their purses and stuff like that.

Also, really high snow drifts makes very hard to run away from cops. We're now into April. We're now into spring. This is not just a fluke. This is not just a weird seasonal thing. And I'm glad you mentioned there's a variety of reasons. I'm not opposed to deploying the National Guard out there. I also think you can say it's not really an effective long-term solution.

If you want a safer city, you need more police on the streets,

and you need better prosecutors and need to put criminals behind bars. I went, because I remember

writing about this a while back. It's been fiscal 2022. The District of Columbia police arrested 15,315 people.

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