Some of the 800 National Guard members deployed by the Trump administration began arriving as police and federal officials took the first steps in an uneasy partnership to reduce crime in what President Donald Trump called – without substantiation – a lawless city.
The influx on Tuesday came the morning after the Republican president announced he would be activating the guard members and taking over the District’s police department. He cited a crime emergency – but referred to the same crime that city officials stress is already falling noticeably. The president holds the legal right to make such moves, at least for a month.
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 US 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 DC police for up to 30 days, though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested it could last longer as they “reevaluate and reassess” following the monthlong period. 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 US 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.
Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from Washington, DC, said Trump has accused Democrats of being “weak on crime”.
“He singled out Democrat-run cities like Oakland – which is outside San Francisco – New York, Baltimore, even Chicago,” she said. “Given the fact they’re run by Democrats … this is causing a little bit of concern.”
Democrats are calling the move “a power grab”.
“Even though they’re saying this is technically legal, it is a hostile takeover given that these powers have actually never been executed in modern history,” Halkett said.
Trump’s bumpy relationship with DC
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 percent 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.
“The White House says crime may be down, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem and that violent crime exists at levels that are far too high,” Halkett said.
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 the summer of 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, emphasising common ground with the Trump administration on issues such as the successful effort to bring the National Football League’s (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 DC 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 DC 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 DC; it’s just about power”.
