Trump's takeover of DC's police: a warning and another episode in his anti-urban (blue voters) agenda
It's in all the media that Trump has taken over the DC police department ("Trump Deploys National Guard to D.C., Moves to Take Over City’s Police Department," Wall Street Journal), even though crime is on the decline ( "Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows," Washington Post).
Eugene Scott of the Boston Globe argues its more about warning blue cities to back off ("The real reason Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington: This is the president’s latest attempt at retribution and signaling to other liberal cities how little tolerance he has for criticism").
President Trump’s decision to dispatch the National Guard to Washington, D.C., to combat violent crime despite data showing violent crime at a 30-year low isn’t about solving an actual problem. It is his latest attempt at fulfilling a frequent campaign promise centering on retribution and signaling to other liberal cities how little tolerance he has for continued criticism of his policies. And if past is prologue, few groups will suffer more from this approach to governing than the Black and Latino youths who are often blamed for systemic crises in America’s major cities.
While the president’s impetus for his latest action was couched in concerns about ongoing acts of violence, Trump’s frustration with the city may be rooted in deeper, long-standing issues with some of America’s most influential cities — and the people who occupy them.
Trump has long characterized cities with large Black and Latino populations as places of decay and chaos. Trump’s issues with the urban core arguably reached their zenith when he called for the death of five Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted in 1989 of the assault and rape of a white woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park — something he has doubled down on despite the convictions being vacated. In both Trump’s first and current presidential terms, the act of criticizing Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., became a far more common pastime of the president than praising what makes them great.
Also see this past entry, opining about Trump's frequent criticizing of cities without any interest in supporting improvement.
-- "Elijah Cummings, President Trump and Revisiting 'The Urban Agenda'" (2019)
Labels: crime, federal policies and the city, Home Rule/Dillon Law/local government action, policing
posted by Richard Layman @ 7:19 PM&Permanent Link
6 Comments:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/trumps-washington-dc-takeover-heres-what-the-feds-are-really-doing.html
Bewildered by the sudden influx of armed and armored agents swarming my hometown, on Tuesday morning, I decided to walk a sweltering mile in their shoes. Trump claims that emergency conditions require him to use the MPD to protect federal buildings and national monuments—so I went down to the Mall to follow the pathway of those DEA agents, hoping to see what they saw.
What I witnessed was an idyllic scene of American tourism. A nerd in a Millennium Falcon shirt made a beeline for the Air and Space Museum. A French-speaking couple took videos of each other trying to mount their Lime scooters. A set of parents and their adult children sat in the shade of some trees, giddily sucking down Rocket Pops. A time traveler from 2014 used a selfie stick to get a shot of her whole family in front of the Capitol.
Trump says Congress needs to pass crime bill, including 30-day extension of D.C. police takeover
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-congress-needs-pass-crime-bill-including-30-day-extension-dc-police-2025-08-13/
On D.C., Trump has the right idea but the wrong reaction. As usual.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/12/trump-dc-takeover-marc-fisher/
The president, driven almost entirely by his craving to dominate the day on TV and in the minds of his supporters, is onto something with his tirade against crime in D.C. He instinctively understands that the city feels unsafe, that the now-common sight of teens riding presumably stolen ATVs down D.C.’s grand avenues, popping wheelies and taunting motorists; the ubiquity of shoplifters and of retailers’ annoying safeguards against them; and the horror stories about violent carjackings — all this makes residents feel disrespected and unprotected.
So if Trump had proposed or even imposed real solutions, and if he had sought to win over or at least work hand in hand with the District’s leaders, he could have been of some service. But as every American knows in their gut by now, that is not how this president rolls.
A real effort to address the city’s woes, rather than simply bashing the place and staging a few weeks’ worth of made-for-TV stunts, would have looked like this:
-- Instead of diverting hundreds of FBI agents and other federal officers from the vital work they do on national security and complex crimes, Trump could have pushed to give the District the resources it needs to recruit and train enough police officers to get back to full strength after pandemic and budget woes led to a wave of retirements and resignations. He could also have pressed Congress to restore funding cuts that led the D.C. Council to trim services this year. Such moves would have been an enduring fix rather than a four-week show.
-- Rather than stationing hundreds of National Guard troops to hang out on street corners — a movie we’ve seen before, such as during Trump I, in the tense summer following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 — the president could have advocated funding to address the city’s breathtaking truancy rate. Much of the D.C. crime that creates the air of disorder is committed by young people who would be far better off in school or engaged in vocational training.
-- Almost a third of D.C. schoolchildren routinely skip school — an improvement over the early post-pandemic years, when truancy rates topped 40 percent, but still an appalling number. Federal funding for counselors and truancy officers would have been a helpful gesture, as would federal expertise from the Education Department. Oh, what’s that you say? Gutted? By the same president who wants to slash youth crime in the city? Ah, never mind then. Let’s move on.
By sending troops to D.C. and eyeing Oakland, Trump continues targeting Black-led cities
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/trump-troops-black-mayors-20812666.php
Critics don’t think that’s a coincidence. Trump’s focus on Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, New York and Oakland is part of a larger pattern in which the president has suggested cities with majority-Black populations, or those led by Black leaders, are hotbeds of crime and corruption and symbols of American decline.
“I see this as a political dog whistle to his base, evoking long-running stereotypes that Black mayors cannot adequately govern or are soft on crime in their cities,” said Jordie Davies, a professor of political science at UC Irvine. “Donald Trump is engaging in political theater so he can be seen as responding to the racist ideas that these cities are poorly run and overrun with crime — even as statistics demonstrate that violent crime in major U.S. cities, including D.C., is down this year.”
... “If he is going to start lying about major American cities to justify sending the military there, it is not surprising to me that he would pick cities with Black leadership and significant Black populations,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said Monday. “That is straight up Donald Trump’s alley and straight out of his racist playbook.”
Trump’s takeover of D.C.’s police force isn’t just another diversion from Jeffrey Epstein
The president’s desire to deploy federal troops in blue state cities to bend them to his will should not be discounted as mere sleight of hand
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/trump-washington-dc-military-20812743.php
“In another transparent ploy to distract America from his coverup of the Epstein file, Donald Trump now wants to militarize the District of Columbia,” Raskin said in a written statement, “to attack crime and clean up graffiti in the capital city despite the fact that crime is at a 30-year low in Washington and graffiti seems to be pretty sparse.”
Whether intentionally or not, Trump has indeed mastered the art of diversion. During his press conference, for instance, he bounced from D.C. crime to his forthcoming summit with Vladimir Putin, to tariffs on Chinese imports, to transgender athletes, to his own real estate experience. But his longstanding desire to deploy federal troops in blue state cities to bend them to his will should not be discounted as mere sleight of hand.
... Trump’s not-at-all hidden fantasy has been to become, to be charitable, something of an authoritarian. And the D.C. deployment is yet another dictatorship cosplay warm-up exercise.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/carjacking-crime-police-dc-maryland/679951/
Inside the Carjacking Crisis
On the street with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
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