“They fought back against law enforcement last night, and they’re not going to be fighting back long,” Donald Trump said of young people on a “rampage through city streets” at his press conference this morning. “See, they fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand.”
Lay this comment against a series of executive orders about law enforcement and civil rights that the president has issued over the last seven months, and one consequence of the federalization of police in Washington DC becomes evident: Trump will ignore measured effectiveness in reducing crime for the political value of a show of force.
“There is no public safety emergency warranting the deployment of the national guard on DC streets or the federalization of the city’s police force,” said Ryan Downer, legal director of the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, a Washington DC-based civil rights group that has litigated police brutality cases.
Noting a sharp decrease in violent crime – reaching a 30-year low this year – Downer said that federalizing control of the district “is an invitation for abuse. When you try to solve a problem of criminal behavior with overpolicing and harsher penalties … you see increases in police violence and police harassment. It’s a call at the highest levels for police lawlessness.”
Related: Trump spreads false narratives about DC crime – just as he did with LA
Downer said his group would be vigilantly looking for stories to share about police abuses over the term of federal control of the district’s police. But accountability under these conditions is complicated.
Police officers almost anywhere else in the US are constrained both by state and federal law. If a local cop in New York or Los Angeles brutalizes someone in the course of an arrest, they can be arrested by either state or local police, and accountable to a state court and a prosecutor elected by local voters.
Uniquely in the US, a serious felony in Washington DC is prosecuted not by the elected attorney general for the district, but by a federal prosecutor appointed by the president – Jeanne Pirro, TV judge turned US attorney for the District of Columbia. And a crime prosecuted in that federal court can be pardoned by the president, as we saw with the convictions of rioters from the January 6 insurrection.
“This is ultimately a problem of DC not having statehood,” said Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU of Washington DC. The city council passes laws covering the district and the mayor controls the police force, but the president can declare an emergency that gives him control for 30 days, she said. “He is acting under a pretextual emergency and extending the sort of blatant abuse of power over DC in a way that he could not do in any other jurisdiction as of right now.”
Local organizations said they view Trump’s declaration as yet another reason to call for statehood.
“Statehood is the only path to real accountability and local control. Without it, the current administration will continue to treat us as powerless and deploy power over us,” said Clinique Chapman, CEO of the DC Justice Lab. “This latest overreach mirrors nationwide efforts to disempower Black-led cities, elected officials and prosecutors, while leaving federal agencies, unaccountable to our residents, in control of our justice system.”
Violent crime is higher in Washington DC than the national average. But it is not among the most violent large cities in the United States today, and the number of incidents have been falling in Washington DC for about two years. Trump cited figures during the press conference from 2023, while ignoring precipitous drops in most categories of violent crime since. Violent crime overall was at a 30-year low on the day Trump took office this January.
Decrying local leaders who “demonize” and “handcuff” aggressive police, Trump issued an executive order in April, Strengthening And Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement To Pursue Criminals And Protect Innocent Citizens, calling for the federal government to withdraw its support for consent decrees and other federal oversight on civil rights and police brutality and for city to “unleash high-impact local police forces”.
Then he went on to test out the experiment in California. Over the objections of California governor Gavin Newsom, Trump called in nearly 5,000 national guard troops and to guard federal property in Los Angeles, a move facing a three-day hearing today for Newsom’s federal court challenge.
But Trump has also called in the national guard in Washington DC in the past. Troops were present during protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020. US park police dispersed hundreds of demonstrators in Lafayette Park in front of the White House during the protests using chemical irritants, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, flash grenades and a baton charge.
Related: ‘Red meat to throw to his base’: DC residents on Trump’s police takeover
The federal government settled an ACLU lawsuit over the dispersal of peaceful protesters at Lafayette Park in 2022, agreeing to policy changes that restrict park police from arbitrarily withdrawing demonstration permits, allowing protesters to leave safely and to identify themselves clearly, and modifying Secret Service policy to make clear that uses of force and dispersals are not normally justified by the unlawful conduct of some individuals in a crowd.
At the press conference on Monday, Trump seemed to ignore that completely and talked about the conduct of protesters writ large as justification for police violence.
“They’re standing and they’re screaming at them an inch away from their face, and then they start spitting in their face,” Trump said. “And I said: ‘You tell them you spit and we hit,’ and they can hit real hard … People are spitting in their face, and they’re not allowed to do anything, but now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”
The downward trend in violence in Washington is consistent with what’s being reported in other large cities across the country, according to statistical tracking by the Council on Criminal Justice. But that may not matter if the president is ignoring data in favor of ideology and bluster.
“He made some pretty bold statements that I think should concern everyone in the country at that press conference,” Hopkins said. “DC is being done now, but he is looking at other cities, right? He just can move more swiftly with DC.”
