National Guard members arrive as Washington's new law-enforcement reality starts taking shape

Independent

2 days ago

The new picture of law enforcement in the nation's capital began taking shape Tuesday as some of the 800 National Guard members deployed by the Trump administration began arriving. The city's police and federal officials, projecting cooperation, took the first steps in an uneasy partnership to reduce crime in what President Donald Trump called — without substantiation — a lawless city.
The influx came the morning after the Republican president announced he would be activating the guard members and taking over the District's police department, something the law allows him to do temporarily. He cited a crime emergency — but referred to the same crime that city officials stress is already falling noticeably.
Mayor Muriel Bowser pledged to work alongside the federal officials Trump has tasked with overseeing the city's law enforcement, while insisting the police chief remained in charge of the department and its officers.
'How we got here or what we think about the circumstances — right now we have more police, and we want to make sure we use them,' she told reporters.
The tone was a shift from the day before, when Bowser said Trump's plan to take over the Metropolitan Police Department and call in the National Guard was not a productive step and argued his perceived state of emergency simply doesn't match the declining crime numbers. Still, the law gives the federal government more sway over the capital city than in U.S. states, and Bowser said her administration's ability to push back is limited.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on social media that the meeting was productive.
The law allows Trump to take over the D.C. police for up to 30 days, though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested it could last longer as authorities later 'reevaluate and reassess." Extending federal control past that time would require Congressional approval, something likely tough to achieve in the face of Democratic resistance.
About 850 federal law enforcement officers were deployed in Washington on Monday and arrested 23 people overnight, Leavitt said. The charges, she said, included gun and drug crimes, drunk driving, subway fare evasion and homicide.
The U.S. Park Police has also removed 70 homeless encampments. People who were living in them can leave, go to a homeless shelter or go into drug addiction treatment, Leavitt said. Those who refuse could face fines or jail time.
The city and Trump have had a bumpy relationship
While Trump invokes his plan by saying that 'we're going to take our capital back,' Bowser and the MPD maintain that violent crime overall in Washington has decreased to a 30-year low after a sharp rise in 2023. Carjackings, for example, dropped about 50% in 2024 and are down again this year. More than half of those arrested, however, are juveniles, and the extent of those punishments is a point of contention for the Trump administration.
Bowser, a Democrat, spent much of Trump's first term in office openly sparring with the Republican president. She fended off his initial plans for a military parade through the streets and stood in public opposition when he called in a multi-agency flood of federal law enforcement to confront anti-police brutality protesters in summer 2020. She later had the words 'Black Lives Matter' painted in giant yellow letters on the street about a block from the White House.
In Trump's second term, backed by Republican control of both houses of Congress, Bowser has walked a public tightrope for months, emphasizing common ground with the Trump administration on issues such as the successful effort to bring the NFL's Washington Commanders back to the District of Columbia.
She watched with open concern for the city streets as Trump finally got his military parade this summer. Her decision to dismantle Black Lives Matter Plaza earlier this year served as a neat metaphor for just how much the power dynamics between the two executives had evolved.
Now that fraught relationship enters uncharted territory as Trump has followed through on months of what many D.C. officials had quietly hoped were empty threats. The new standoff has cast Bowser in a sympathetic light, even among her longtime critics.
'It's a power play and we're an easy target,' said Clinique Chapman, CEO of the D.C. Justice Lab. A frequent critic of Bowser, whom she accuses of 'over policing our youth' with the recent expansions of Washington's youth curfew, Chapman said Trump's latest move 'is not about creating a safer D.C. It's just about power.'
Where the power actually lies
Bowser contends that all the power resides with Trump and that local officials can do little other than comply and make the best of it. As long as Washington remains a federal enclave with limited autonomy under the 1973 Home Rule Act, she said, it will remain vulnerable to such takeovers.
Trump is the first president to use the law's Section 740 to take over Washington's police for up to 30 days during times of emergencies.
For Trump, the effort to take over public safety in D.C. reflects an escalation of his aggressive approach to law enforcement. The District of Columbia's status as a congressionally established federal district gives him a unique opportunity to push his tough-on-crime agenda, though he has not proposed solutions to the root causes of homelessness or crime.
Trump's declaration of a state of emergency fits the general pattern of his second term in office. He has declared states of emergency on issues ranging from border protection to economic tariffs, enabling him to essentially rule via executive order. In many cases, he has moved forward while the courts sorted them out.
Bowser's claims about successfully driving down violent crime rates received backing earlier this year from an unlikely source. Ed Martin, Trump's original choice for U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, issued a press release in April hailing a 25% drop in violent crime rates from the previous year.
His recently confirmed replacement candidate, former judge and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, brushed aside the data to argue that violent crime remains a significant issue for victims. 'These were vibrant human beings cut down because of illegal guns,' she said.
___
Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix and Ali Swenson in New York contributed reporting.