Once known as “Chocolate City” for its historically large Black population, Washington remains under partial federal control.
The federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department under President Donald Trump marks the first time a commander-in-chief has seized control. Some 800 National Guard members were deployed to the city last week.
Additionally, six Republican-led states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia — have authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to Washington.
It’s unclear what these troops will do, given how little activity has taken place over the past week.
On Aug. 15, Washington government officials filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block its takeover of the city’s police department. The previous night, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi named Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the “emergency police commissioner.” Cole will have the powers of the city’s police chief.
While Washington is the nation’s capital, it’s a district and not a state, giving presidents the authority to take some degree of federal control.
Trump’s latest executive order was issued Aug. 11 following an attempted carjacking of a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer on Aug. 3. He said that the order places the police department under Bondi’s command and allows him to deploy the National Guard to address crime.
According to data from the police department, crime has been falling in the capital since 2024.
“For decades, D.C. has been used as a petri dish by Congress and presidential administrations to try out a variety of policies,” Christina Henderson, an at-large member of the D.C. Council, said in a press release hours after Trump’s announcement.
“Without statehood, we are limited in our ability to prevent or deter these repeated federal incursions; however, the president outlined an entirely new level of interference,” she added.
Trump has continued to insist, despite crime statistics indicating otherwise, that Washington is dangerous.
“Be Prepared! There will be no ‘Mr. Nice Guy.’ We want our Capital BACK,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social after the carjacking.
During an Aug. 11 press conference, the president stood alongside members of his Cabinet and Washington U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose office will prosecute those arrested during the temporary takeover.
Trump said that he has the option to extend the federalization of the city’s police department for 30 days under the Home Rule Act. The act lays out guidelines for the district to govern itself, with specific limitations enforced by Congress.
Pirro said during the press conference that she supports Trump’s call to lower the age to prosecute adolescents as adults to 14. The former DOGE employee was allegedly attacked by teenagers.
Henderson welcomed working with federal partners — rather than a takeover — to achieve “some actual solutions.” She hopes that a collaboration could help city officials’ “efforts to further reduce [the] crime rate in the District,” she added.
Currently, crime is at a 30-year low in Washington. According to data from the police department, violent crime is down by 26% year-to-date, homicides are down by 32%, and carjackings have nearly halved.
This isn’t the first time Trump has deployed the National Guard in the city. In response to nationwide protests after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, Trump and then-Attorney General Bill Barr utilized a legal loophole to deploy the U.S. National Guard in the city. Trump also dispatched federal agents to Portland, Oregon, resulting in hundreds of arrests.
Trump can briefly take over D.C. police under the Home Rule Act. To push a takeover beyond a month, he would need Congress to extend it.
Still, Trump can pursue actions that fall short of a full takeover by mobilizing the National Guard and seizing control of the police department.
Black leaders and mayors respond to the takeover
During a press conference on Aug. 11, Mayor Muriel Bowser said that crime spiked post-COVID, but that local authorities “worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets and gave our police officers more tools.”
She noted that local authorities were “able to reverse that 2023 crime spike.”
Bowser also said that Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith will continue to lead the department, which will operate under local laws.
The Congressional Black Caucus shared Bowser’s concerns.
“Taking over local control of the D.C. Metropolitan Police and deploying the National Guard under the guise of public safety puts residents in danger,” the group said in a press release on Aug. 12. “This unprecedented attack on D.C. home rule is a blatantly racist and despicable power grab, and it won’t stop in Washington, D.C.”
Trump has also called out other cities with large Black populations, including Baltimore, Chicago, and New York. And they all have Black mayors.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told Politico earlier this month that Trump’s actions illustrate “the continuation of the president, unfortunately, spouting these racist-based, right-wing propaganda talking points about cities and Black-led cities.”
Earlier this month, Scott announced that Baltimore’s violent crime rate is at its lowest in decades.
In several interviews this month, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also responded to Trump’s latest move. Trump doesn’t have the authority to federalize local law enforcement in the first place, he said.
“He is provoking on sending federal troops, the National Guard, into cities to plunder them, though those entities do not have policing power,” Johnson said. “They can’t even do the very thing that he claims that he wants them to do.”
In Chicago, violent crime is down 22% compared with the same period last year. This year has seen 110 fewer homicides than in the same period in 2024.
How can the takeover lead to overpolicing?
Common Cause President and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement on Aug. 11 that “all Americans should be concerned as Donald Trump lays his sights on other communities throughout the country.”
“Declaring this emergency, sending the military into the neighborhoods of D.C., despite recent drops in violent crime, is a ruthless, targeted attack on the people of this great city,” she said.
Solomón, who runs a nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen democracy, said that Trump’s move will “cause terror in our communities and hurt everyone — families, small businesses, and the local economy.”
When Trump and Republican lawmakers made similar threats to take over D.C. earlier this year, some Black residents told Capital B that these actions fit into a long history of denying a heavily Black city the ability to govern itself.
Being Black in America is defined by haunting statistics, especially when encountering the criminal legal system. For one, Black people are arrested at 2.5 times the rate of their white counterparts, despite similar criminal activity rates, according to a report by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
In May 2020, protests across the country after the police murder of George Floyd helped to shine a light on other killings involving law enforcement, and underscored the use of excessive force by officers during encounters with Black and brown Americans. Nearly 300 Black people were killed by police in 2020 alone, according to one analysis.
Now as federal agents and the National Guard are being deployed to D.C., attendance at public demonstrations may decline, advocates said during a Black Lives Matter Grassroots media call in June. Black people — regardless of their immigration status — must remain vigilant, said Guerline M. Jozef, the founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, during the call.
Trump’s track record with law enforcement
During the Aug. 11 press conference, Trump said, “They’ll not be allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”
But on the first day of his second term, Trump issued a sweeping clemency order that included pardons for nearly all the convicted Jan. 6 rioters.
Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. They threatened elected officials, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, and assaulted law enforcement officers as Congress certified Biden’s election. Trump declined for hours to call them off, according to unsealed court documents from the Justice Department.
Many people were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to federal prison after Jan. 6.
But before Jan. 6, during the 2020 protests following Floyd’s death, Trump deployed federal troops in 15 states and the district.
At the time, Trump posted on social media and threatened that the federal government “will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.”
Staff writer Brandon Tensley contributed to this report.
This story has been updated.