Despite last week’s lawsuit, which focused primarily on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter (since revised) purporting to “take over” the D.C. Metropolitan Police Force, the federal occupation of D.C. and assault on migrants has metastasized. Random checkpoints snare drivers indiscriminately. Violent arrests horrify residents, as when “Federal agents detained a food delivery driver as he emerged from a Northwest Washington coffee shop Saturday morning, an incident captured on video by numerous witnesses .... that showed the officers tackling him to the ground, holding him down and appearing to use a stun gun before driving him away in an unmarked black vehicle.” MAGA governors have diverted their national guardsmen (who may or may not be armed) to join this fascist spectacle.
Trump’s operation stems from his lifelong fixation with portraying urban black and brown men as a menace to “real Americans” (i.e., white people who buy his urban dystopian fantasy). He has not changed his racist tune since he took out full-page ads in four of the city’s major papers that led with the headline “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” Those ads urged for the execution and help secured the convictions of five teenage boys, the later-exonerated Central Park Five.
Trump describes D.C. as a criminal hellscape. However, “Washington had a lower violent crime rate than Indianapolis, Albuquerque, Memphis, Nashville, or Milwaukee. Washington also had a lower property crime rate in 2024 than Tucson, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Albuquerque, Memphis, or Seattle,” Washington Monthly reported. “FBI data show that the homicide rate in the nation’s capital fell 39 percent in 2024 to a rate lower than Indianapolis, Baltimore, Detroit, Nashville, and Milwaukee, and DC’s rate for all violent crime was its lowest in more than 30 years.”
The telltale sign that Trump’s declared crime “emergency” is an utter farce? Trump claims the crime has vanished—in less than a week! On Monday, Trump lied: “Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour!”
Despite Trump’s ludicrous boast that “people are flocking to D.C. again,” restaurant reservations have plunged by nearly 25% since his D.C. occupation. (As we saw in Los Angeles, staging a federal military takeover is a recipe to crush the local economy.) Bondi brags about a few dozen arrests (many are ICE targets she claims are violent) but few, if any, D.C. residents think Trump’s occupation will reduce crime—especially if he is aiming at undocumented immigrants, who are less likely to commit crimes.
Even if there were a crime wave, law enforcement expert Dr. Donnell Harvin writes in Just Security that, given what local policing methods have achieved, “the president’s bulldozer approach is more likely to make matters worse.” We know what works to fight crime, and it is not stationing national guardsmen at monuments or rounding up nonviolent immigrants. Harvin cites the Department of Justice’s “empirically based findings point toward family and school-based prevention rather than enforcement surges” as the most effective crime fighting techniques.
Moreover, national guard forces generally are not trained in civilian law enforcement, which depends on “community policing [that] focuses on building relationships, trust, and problem-solving partnerships within specific neighborhoods.” Local police get instruction in D.C. law and in de-escalation techniques; guardsmen do not. As Harvin writes: “The ideal is when locals collaborate with law enforcement to identify, prevent, deter, and interdict crimes and criminals within their communities. This requires trust.”
In particular, deploying violent, masked, and unidentified ICE agents to physically accost and haul away people going about their business (as they did in Los Angeles) will not make the city safer. “Immigrants interviewed in and near Washington in recent days described a new sense of anxiety,” The Washington Post reported. “And some said they worried that the result could be the opposite of the president’s intended goals, fracturing relationships between immigrants and local authorities, deterring immigrants from reporting crimes and, in the end, making the city less safe.”
If Trump, who pardoned violent Jan. 6 felons, actually cared about D.C. crime, he would not have appointed a TV personality or an unqualified political buffoon to the U.S. attorney’s job, nor would he have cut more than $1B in D.C. funding. As Reuters recently reported, “The Federal Emergency Management Agency said…that D.C. and surrounding areas would receive $20 million less this year from its urban security fund, reducing the funding to $25.2 million and amounting to a 44% year-on-year cut.”
The D.C. occupation presents democracy advocates with three challenges:
First, they must persuade Americans that two things can be true: the D.C. occupation is a totalitarian threat indicative of Trump’s wider ambition to militarize American cities and a distraction from Trump’s colossal failures (e.g., inflation, Ukraine, cutting healthcare to pay for billionaires’ tax cuts, the Jeffrey Epstein files coverup). Pro-democracy voices cannot let Trump escape blame for policy blunders, but they must also convince Americans that Trump’s militarized assault on constitutional rights will only continue if he is not stopped in D.C.
Second, D.C. residents need political leaders (like those in California) to vigorously confront Trump both rhetorically and legally. Accommodation has never slowed Trump. Despite D.C.’s initial efforts to cooperate, Bondi unveiled her police takeover scheme and Trump dragooned red state national guardsmen to join the D.C. occupation. D.C. residents are entitled to fierce litigation on their behalf to challenge this phony “emergency,” stop all national guardsmen from conducting routine policing, halt ICE’s suspected racial profiling, and block unconstitutional traffic stops. Ferocity in court, D.C. government offices, and in Congress must match the public’s righteous anger.
Finally, massive, peaceful protest and mobilization must be employed to save democracy. Americans should seize the opportunity on Labor Day to join union members and leaders (who have been front and center in fighting authoritarianism) to protest peacefully. Keep watching this space for updates on where to do so, or go here to find an event near you. There are few more effective ways to show the bully-in-chief who still holds power in America.
Yes and just forget the damn crime statistics argument. This is NOT the way our country runs. Trump is MAKING a hellscape. I salute those brave enough to film it and show it.🙏
There is a LOT more crime In DC since Trump took office. It is he and his unqualified, abhorrent members of his administration who are the felons. Not the good people who live in the district.