Lots of things can reduce crime rates. The question is: should we accept police-state tactics? After all, there are other approaches.

To hear Donald Trump and his defenders tell it, the president's decision to send troops into the nation's capital to address the District's crime problem has been a resounding success.

Crime in DC, the president crows, is virtually non-existent now. It's safe again, he assures us, and all because of his decision to place the District under virtual military occupation.

Indeed, it has worked so well, or so he tells us, that now the same approach is called for in Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, Memphis, and any other large city where crime is "out of control."

Aside from the fact that crime is actually down significantly in all of those places and has been falling considerably without his help, the truth is, even if sending in the military to cities across the country would further "bring down crime" in some appreciable and causal manner, this wouldn't make doing so a good idea.

Just because an idea might work to reduce crime, after all, doesn't mean it's an acceptable public policy.

Here are some ideas to reduce crime, violence, and death, but which few would find acceptable

For instance, we know that men commit a disproportionate share of the nation's crime, particularly violent crime. But if knowing that, we were then to advocate sex-selective abortion and terminate, say, half of all male fetuses -- because after all, that would absolutely guarantee less violent crime in about 20 years -- people would rightly object, and not just those opposed to abortion on moral grounds.

So too, we could theoretically become a totalitarian hell hole like North Korea or a religiously fascist one, like Saudi Arabia or Iran -- none of those have much crime after all -- but I'm guessing that all but the most rabid MAGA folks wouldn't trade in the Constitution, and core concepts like due process and equal protection, to bring the crime rate massively downward.

And although sending troops to the nation's cities might be capable of producing short-term reductions in crime, the only way such an outcome could be sustained would be, indeed, to make those postings permanent -- in effect, turning such spaces into mini-police states.

Although sadistic racists like Stephen Miller might salivate at the thought of such a thing, it's doubtful that most Americans would.

Turning the cities where millions of Americans live into occupied territories (but only in places with large numbers of Black people or Democratic Mayors, even though there is plenty of crime in other and much whiter spaces too, like Anchorage Alaska, Springfield, Missouri, and Billings, Montana, all of which have higher per capita violent crime rates than DC), isn't acceptable, and the violations of the Constitution that would inhere under such a scheme would be intolerable, even if they "worked" in some appreciable sense.

Along those same lines, I'd love to ban white men, in particular, from being able to obtain assault rifles and other high-capacity weapons, given our penchant for using such things in mass shootings. But I realize that such a racially-specific scheme, even though it might prevent most terrible mass murders, would be untenable and wrongheaded under a constitutional republic.

There are other and better ways to reduce crime than military occupation

Additionally, resorting to military occupation as a crime control tactic is a slap in the face to those working to bring down rates of criminal violence in their communities, using far more thoughtful methods -- methods that are also working, right now, but about which most people never hear.

These are methods that aren't about force, domination, and looking tough, but about community building -- the kind of thing MAGA rejects because its supporters prefer tough talk and performative masculinity to actually reducing crime and solving problems.

In cities across the country, community-based violence interruption programs targeted to communities at high risk for gun violence have brought down violent crime, especially homicides, in some cases to record lows.

In Baltimore, rather than the crackdown mentality that predominated after the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015, new efforts focused on connecting high-risk individuals and communities to needed services, outreach by persons from the community whom residents trust, and direct intervention by violence interrupters like those with the Safe Streets program, have brought violent crime in the city to an all-time low. Homicides in Baltimore are down 40 percent in just the past five years.

According to the description of the program:

Safe Streets outreach workers and violence interrupters work on the frontlines to put themselves in front of a firearm to de-escalate situations and mediate conflict. Safe Streets staff members are screened, interviewed, and selected to work in specific target areas within the city in which they are identified as credible messengers. Safe Streets team members can connect and build rapport with individuals who are classified as high-risk and connect them to life-sustaining resources.

The violence interrupters in Baltimore are trained to:

* Listen to each party involved,

* De-escalate the situation, and

* Identify ways to meet the needs of each person in a conflict.

Although Safe Streets is not the only factor contributing to Baltimore's declining crime rates, these efforts are positively linked to crime reduction across the city, according to research from Johns Hopkins University. Specifically:

During the first four years of program implementation across the five longer-running sites, Safe Streets was associated with a statistically significant average reduction in homicides of 32%. Over the entire study period, among these longer-running sites, homicides were 22% lower than forecasted if the program had not been implemented... Over the entire study period across all sites, Safe Streets was associated with a statistically significant 23% reduction in nonfatal shootings... Four sites had significant reductions ranging from 29%...to 84%

And it's not only in Baltimore where such efforts have paid real dividends. Similar efforts have helped reduce gun fatalities in Chicago, the South Bronx, and Richmond, California, among other communities.

Of course, such programs are not a panacea. Broader structural changes in low-income and marginalized communities are also critical for producing lasting reductions in violence. And unless violence interruption programs are consistently funded -- including higher pay for those performing this vital work -- their long-term benefits can diminish over time.

But that reality isn't due to some inherent flaw in such programs. Instead, it's a result of inadequate political will on the part of lawmakers who default to more aggressive policing, harsher sentences, and a "get tough" approach, not because those things work, but because they play to the fears of a public whose concerns about crime can be weaponized by politicians for their own gain.