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President Donald Trump announced today he is placing Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, and is deploying the National Guard in the city, insisting the action was necessary “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” He said this would be “Liberation Day” for D.C.
“The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled,” Trump said today, contradicting figures that the U.S. attorney released earlier this year showing a downward trajectory for these crimes. Car thefts were even year over year, and armed carjackings are down 53 percent.
As recently as January, the Department of Justice was touting the fact that violent crime in Washington, D.C., “is the lowest it has been in over 30 years.”
“I’m officially invoking section 740 of the district of Columbia home rule act,” Trump said today, referring to the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which contains a provision that authorizes the president to temporarily seize control of the police in the case of an emergency for 48 hours at a time. “I’m placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.” The move to bring in the National Guard came from a presidential memo signed earlier this morning.
From the White House podium, Trump alluded to the idea that police will be emboldened by the changes. “They love to spit in the face of the police as the police are standing up there in uniform,” he said, apparently referring to protesters. “The police are standing and they’re told, ‘Don’t do anything under any circumstances.’ And you can see they want to get at it. And they’re standing there and 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 most prominent recent example of protesters attacking law enforcement in Washington, D.C., is probably Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of President Trump rioted outside the Capitol building. One hundred and forty police officers were injured in the incident, and one of those injured officers, Brian Sicknick, later died. Trump, however, focused on violence perpetrated by individuals who are under 18, as well as disbanding homeless encampments within the city.
Today, Trump suggested he may seek to deploy the National Guard to other cities as he did to Los Angeles in June, following protests against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids. He mentioned Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland.
“We have other cities also that are bad,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C., and we’re going to clean it up real quick, very quickly.”
Trump’s announcement that the federal government would take control of D.C.’s police force was preceded by an incident involving Edward Coristine, a former DOGE staffer known by his online alias “Big Balls.” Coristine, who still works for the Social Security Administration, was injured in an attempted carjacking.
Coristine, Trump said today, “was left dripping in blood. He thought he was dead with a broken nose and concussion.”
Trump’s announcement came the same morning that a judge rejected a Department of Justice request to unseal grand jury testimony given in the case against Jeffrey Epstein. The embattled president has been trying to contain the continuing fallout from the Department of Justice’s announcement last month that it would give no further disclosures in the Epstein case. Many on social media decried the move in D.C. as a distraction from the case. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department informed Trump in May that his name was repeatedly mentioned in the Epstein files. Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing.
