Trump readies federal moves on D.C. crime, takes over D.C. police [View all]

Source: Washington Post

Updated August 11, 2025 at 10:45 a.m. EDT


President Donald Trump announced Monday that he would place the D.C. D.C. police under direct federal control and deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime and clear the city of its homeless population, an extraordinary flex of federal power that could expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically-deployed military force.

The decision to deploy troops comes as the president has been slamming America’s cities as places where crime is out of control, despite two years of declines that have brought homicide levels in many major cities to their lowest levels in decades.

The administration has already mobilized FBI agents in recent days in overnight shifts to help local law enforcement prevent carjackings and violent crime in the city, officials said. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has unusually sweeping powers to intervene over the objections of its residents and leaders, giving the president an opportunity to use it as a laboratory for a militarized approach to urban crime-fighting.

Trump has portrayed crime in the nation’s capital as spiraling upward. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser repeatedly has noted that violent crime has declined for the last two years after a sharp post-pandemic spike in 2023.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/11/trump-national-guard-dc-crime-crackdown/