In August, the President of the United States declared a crime ‘emergency’ in my home town of Washington D.C. Donald Trump rules by declaring ‘emergencies’ where they don’t exist, but this was a new one. An emergency compared to what? The year I bought my condo, 1992, saw 443 homicides ina city of around half a million people; last year, there were only 190 out of almost 700,000. I say ‘only’ because we’ve become so used to a murder rate 20 times that of London that we somehow managed to ignore it.

That, of course, was an option only for white residents – unless you were dumb enough (as I was) to buy a newly renovated loft in an edgy, gentrifying, but still largely black neighbourhood. Such a steal! A dead body showed up behind the building in the first month; the late evenings crackled with gunshots as spring arrived; the house across the street, I slowly realised, was where the local gang gathered: the 17th and Euclid Street crew. ‘It’s not a crack house; it’s a crack home,’ was a parody article in the Onion in 1996. But in the row-house I walked past every day, it was........

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