Justice & Law Quote by Marion Barry

It is hard to beat the accidental comedy of a sentence that tries to launder fear with a footnote. Marion Barry’s line performs a politician’s oldest magic trick: narrowing the definition until the numbers behave. “Aside from the murders” isn’t a caveat; it’s the whole story, shoved into parentheses. Murder is the crime residents can’t rationalize away, the statistic that dominates headlines, shapes neighborhoods, and drains civic trust. By treating it like a removable blemish, Barry reveals the desperate calculus of a city trying to sell normalcy while the public is living something else.

The intent is damage control with a wink of technocratic authority. He’s appealing to the idea that “crime rates” are a spreadsheet problem, not a lived reality. The phrasing also signals a Washington-specific defensiveness: DC is perpetually judged as a symbol of national dysfunction, so the urge to claim a “lowest crime rate” is really an argument about legitimacy. Barry isn’t only defending public safety; he’s defending the city’s reputation, its governance, his own competence.

Subtext: if you count the “right” categories, we’re fine. That’s not merely spin, it’s an invitation to accept a bureaucratic framing over an emotional one. The quote lands because it exposes the brittle seam between statistical truth and social truth. People know that “aside from the murders” is exactly when fear begins. In trying to sound reassuring, Barry accidentally articulates why reassurance fails: you can’t asterisk a body count.