What Trump’s DC Takeover Means For The Capital And Beyond

0:07The Trump administration's deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to the streets of Washington, D.C., ramped up Wednesday night as protesters chanted, go home fascists and get off our streets.

0:25President Trump has also taken over the city's police department for 30 days and says he wants Congress to grant him, quote, long-term control of the force. All this in the name of public safety, despite the fact that D.C.'s violent crime rate is at a 30-year low. And the president suggested that he'd like to use similar tactics to fight criminal activity in places like Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Today, we look at the Trump administration's federal takeover of the nation's capital and what it means for D.C. and cities across the country. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast.

0:57Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

1:04Joining us in studio is Cleve R. Woodson, Jr. He's a White House reporter for The Washington Post. Cleve, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. And also here with us is Alex Coma, senior D.C. politics reporter right here at WAMU. Alex, welcome back. Thanks so much. So President Trump's executive order put the city's police department under federal control. He's also deployed National Guard troops, federal agents to the streets of the Capitol. Cleve, just sort of fill in the details of what the order said. Yeah, it allows the president for 30 days to take over the D.C. Police Department.

1:39It also allows him to surge National Guard troops and federal agents to the streets. It gives him sort of complete control of D.C.'s police for the next 30 days. And there's an effort to possibly extend it or possibly have another state of emergency. So it's unclear how long it'll last. Alex, the president made this announcement on Monday. We're here in D.C. What changes have you seen on the ground? Yeah, I mean, you played some of the clip last night where you're starting to see more of these, you know, checkpoints that involve local police as well as federal officers. This particular one, people were not only checking for traffic citations like broken taillights, but crucially checking immigration status.

2:24This is a big deal in a city like D.C., which has historically been a sanctuary city, limited the amount that police cooperate with immigration enforcements. And now police are taking new steps to erode at that. It has people here alarmed. Well, in his press conference, President Trump didn't only mention crime. He said he wants to clean up homeless encampments and clamp down on youth gatherings. Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people. Well, Cleve, again, you're here in Washington, D.C.

3:02Fact check what the president said just there. Yeah. So I ride a bike to work and I have not I have not yet encountered a roving mob or a person with a bat with a spike through it yet. Right. D.C. does have its problems when it comes to crime. 2023 was a 25-year high for homicides. The city definitely has its warts, but its defenders, the mayor, just everyday D.C. residents have said, you know, crime is actually at relative lows. It's a relatively safe city that has problems that need to be addressed, but it's not sort of the dystopian wasteland that Trump has sort of said, you know, exists in D.C.

3:45to his followers. So far, Alex, who are these federal actions targeting? Yeah, well, we're still trying to suss out where exactly the president is going to focus his attention because so much of this rhetoric you're hearing from him is focused on the stuff he sees, the stuff that's downtown, the stuff that's near the White House. I mean, you saw him yesterday going to the Kennedy Center Honors, and there are, in fact, homeless encampment clearings along his route to the Kennedy Center, which is making it very clear what this is all about, right, which is Trump not wanting this perception of disorder, so much of which is fixed in his head because of when he was president in 2020, when the pandemic and the George Floyd protests happened.

4:24And so, you know, as Cleve was just alluding to, there is crime in this city, but it's largely concentrated in poor disadvantaged communities east of the Anacostia River in Ward 7 and 8 here. And we're not yet seeing a ton of attention being directed there, even though that's where the crime is. Now, those communities aren't especially keen on seeing a bunch of federal police officers come in there either and start cracking heads. But if the focus is on preventing crime, you know, why are the cops not in the place where crime tends to happen around? Well, D.C. has a unique relationship with the federal government, unlike other cities around the country.

4:59Cleve, explain home rule and where it comes into play. Sure. You know, D.C. is not a state, as, you know, everybody that lives in D.C. is probably groaning right now that D.C. is not a state. And the federal government has a large amount of influence over the rules and regulations and statutes that exist in D.C. proper. Now, D.C. residents are able to elect representatives. We elect a mayor, we elect a council. But as the mayor has said recently, President Trump is really acting within his legal purview. And they have to sort of, you know, march to his drummer when it comes to these issues. Now, D.C.'s Mayor Muriel Bowser has walked a delicate line over the last few days calling Trump's takeover of the city's police department unprecedented.

5:50But she's also expressed some appreciation for beefing up security resources. Now, yesterday during a Zoom meeting with invited community leaders, she was not quite as guarded. She said, quote, we don't live in a dirty city. We are not 700 ,000 scumbags and punks, and we don't have neighborhoods that should be bulldozed. Alex, tell us a little bit more about the line city leaders are walking right now as they react to this move by the Trump administration. Yeah, basically ever since Trump got reelected, Mayor Bowser has been trying to, you know, not antagonize the White House essentially to prevent this outcome that we are seeing right now.

6:29So that's why you saw her doing things like ripping out Black Lives Matter Plaza, which is right near the White House and has been a bugaboo for Trump, or clearing a lot of homeless encampments that Trump has identified proactively to try and prevent him from doing it on his own. And so now you're in this place where much of that strategy seems to just not have worked, all because the president got fixated on this issue once again because this Doge staffer got beat up. He gets, you know, worked up about it and all of that work to try and avoid the president's attention by, you know, reducing points of conflict where you really saw the mayor, you know, making a big show of clashing with him during his first term because it was good politics for her and Democrats controlled Congress.

7:13So she had more leeway. Now Republicans control Congress. You know, we're not a state. We have very limited ability to govern ourselves. And so you end up in this situation. How are residents of the district, because I think sometimes people forget people live in Washington, D.C. Right. Cleve, how are residents responding to this? It's obviously mixed. I do think we have to say that there are probably people who have been frustrated with crime and worried about crime. And, you know, maybe they have a little bit of, you know, maybe this could be good, at least in the short term. But a lot of the people that I've talked to and that we've interviewed at the Post, just don't look at it well in any way, shape, or form.

7:58They see it as an unwarranted incursion into the city's autonomy. They see it as demonizing the city that they live in, the city that they love. And they also worry about the creep of authoritarianism or totalitarianism of having tanks in their city. Alex, what have you heard in your reporting? Yeah, I mean, when it comes to D.C.'s political leadership, they're pretty uniformly outraged, even if, as I said, they're measured in what they can say publicly. And same goes for, you know, most residents. Now, I do want to highlight, you know, even people like indicted, recently reelected Ward 8 Councilmember Treyon White, they've called for the National Guard to come into the city before.

8:39He's even said he thinks it's a good idea. I mean, he's coming from some of the communities that have the biggest problems with crime and violence. So I'm not going to say that there's no appetite for more police. Certainly the mayor herself has said for years now that she wants more police and she has tried to spin this as, oh, actually, this could be a good thing if we get more federal resources. But the question that no one at the White House can answer is why they're better positioned to be doing this than people who actually know the city. And that's what everyone is so frustrated with. You know, the mayor keeps trying to say the police chief is still leading this.

9:14They're taking point. Well, if that's the case, then why is the White House involved at all? I mean, that is what everybody here is feeling like. That's just trampling on our very limited rights because the president can't. Well, and has the district bumped up against an ability to expand the police force or expand their presence on the streets in D.C. that perhaps need a little more support? Yeah, I mean, this is a constant fight so much that the council and the mayor have paid for competing studies about how many police does D.C. really need. They saw a big exodus of cops during 2020 when they made very modest reforms.

9:50But these were also tied up in, you know, budget disputes. These are issues that we should be debating locally, I think, is the message that everybody is sending to me. We should be determining around here in the city that we live how many cops we need. Is it the 3 ,100 we have now, the 4 ,000 that the mayor has frequently touted? That's a debate that local political leadership can and should have. There's actually a study that came out by the D.C. auditor that said, actually, the number of cops we have is OK, but it should be locals doing it, not the president, who presumably has other things to focus on.

10:26Go ahead, Cliff. I think it's important to note that Trump is not just making a logistical argument. He is making a political argument aimed directly at his base. His argument about why they're better positioned is that, you know, liberal policies by Democrats have led to just, you know, rampant crime in D.C. You can argue about that, you know, left and right. But that is the argument that he is making and the argument that he is trying to, you know, have spread widespread across the country. Let's pause here and head to a quick break. Alex, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely. Alex Colma is senior D.C.

11:02politics reporter at WAMU, our producing station. Coming up, we talk more about President Trump's portrayal of crime in U.S. urban areas and ask what the federal government can and cannot do in other cities in the name of public safety. That's just ahead.

11:22President Trump is calling his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., a crackdown on crime. But according to the Department of Justice, violent crime is at a 30-year low in the nation's capital. Let's bring Jeff Asher into the conversation. He's co-founder of AH DataLytics, where he tracks and studies national crime statistics. He's also a former analyst for both the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department. Jeff, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks for having me. So we got this message from Dave who says, Crime rate is too high. Down from before, who cares? It's still too high. So let's start there, Jeff.

11:56when we're talking about the story President Trump tells about Washington, D.C., and the data and what it says about crime in the city, just do a quick comparison for us. So the challenge here is that the question, there are two questions. One, is crime too high? Is crime a problem? Are there things that can be done about it from policymakers, from police, from communities? Absolutely. I think everybody can agree that the murder rate, there's still room to improve. The violent crime rate, there's still room to improve. The question being raised, I think, by the White House that contradicts the data is, are things improving?

12:35Are things getting worse or are they getting better? And the data shows that crime in DC, especially violent crime and especially homicide, rose significantly from 2020 through 2023 and has fallen significantly, down 34 % murder through July this year compared to the first seven months of 2023. You're seeing it under crimes like carjacking. There's lots of evidence that we're seeing lots of improvement, which suggests from a policymaker standpoint that we need a whole different set of policy options. We need to understand why we're getting better and not overreact to what we see falsely as things getting worse.

13:13Kaleeb, this isn't the first time we've heard rhetoric from President Trump about crimes, specifically in urban areas. How has he talked about urban public safety in the past? Yeah, that's kind of the problem with crime rates is that the people that are listening to Trump, that are following him on Truth Social, that are watching Fox News, they're not necessarily digging into the crime rates writ large. They're listening to what Donald Trump is saying. And what Donald Trump has said about cities like D.C., about Democrat-led cities, about cities that are majority-minority or minority-led is that these places are dystopian wastelands full of rampant violent crime.

13:54He talks about roving bands of youth, not just in D.C., but in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in other metropolitan areas. And it's largely creating this image, possibly divorced from the facts, of cities as just horrible, horrible places that are in need of remediation. Well, we got this message from Dave in Silver Spring, who says, nothing more than a distraction away from Donald Trump's actions with Jeffrey Epstein and their friend Ghislaine Maxwell. Talk about the context this is happening in, Cleve, and why we're seeing this move right now, according to people who are criticizing the president.

14:34Sure. And to some objective experts who study presidents, right? The Jeffrey Epstein issue is perhaps the biggest rift between Donald Trump and his base, where people are saying, you said you were going to release these files and you have not. And we would like you to be the president that we elected, that we wanted, not critics, not Democrats, his base, MAGA supporters. And over the past month, as I and many others have written, Trump has kind of thrown everything at the wall to sort of distract or take away, there's Obama conspiracy here, and maybe the commander should be the Redskins there and all that stuff.

15:14But this issue, his critics say, is sort of the first time that he's had a really, really salient thing that has completely turned the page. We're all talking about a different subject matter. And this is the first time in, what, nearly half an hour of speaking that we've mentioned Jeffrey Epstein, which is probably different than it was a week or two ago. Well, President Trump also singled out other cities, as you mentioned, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland. And he says these are places with high crime rates that could warrant federal takeovers, too. Jeff, what do crime rates look like in those cities?

15:47Well, it was a strange collection of cities to call out from a what do the trends look like now, from a historical, yes, Oakland and Chicago have high rates of violent crime and murder. Chicago has a 30 percent decline in murder this year after seeing declines in 2023 and 2024. New York had the fewest shootings that they've ever had in the history of their collecting that data this year. Los Angeles reported the fewest murders since 1966 this year. So we're seeing these are not Washington, D.C. or Chicago or one city. These are national trends. We're seeing large declines. And pretty much any city you are going to pick out with maybe three or four exceptions are seeing large national declines.

16:32And so there's not really a good place to look for, hey, this is the city that we all need to pick on that has a historically high level of murder or violent crime, and it's getting much worse. And where does the data about murder rates and violent crime come from? So we have FBI data through 2024 showing a 10 percent drop in murder in 2023 after murder surged 30 percent in 2020 and was kind of at the same level in 2021 and 2022. The FBI just last week reported that murder was down 15 % in 2024. And my organization runs a project called the Real-Time Crime Index, which takes data from, we've got 421 agencies, I think, with data through May.

17:16We'll be publishing the June data very shortly. And so we're getting 102 million people's worth of data. And that really closely tracks the national trend year to year. And so we have this year an even larger, a 20 % drop in murder occurring so far this year. So it's fully expected that we'll see basically the third straight year of a record high national drop in murder based on the data that's available. We got this message from Denise who writes, Why the focus on Washington, D.C.? It has 35 % less violent crime than St. Louis. Washington, D.C. has 25 % less property crime than St. Louis. I live in a St.

17:55Louis suburb. And then we also got this question from Lisa in Maryland who says, is there really no or lower crime in cities run by Republicans? Jeff, what can you tell us? So I'm actually glad we have a question from St. Louis comparing rates because you have to be very careful comparing rates. St. Louis is a metro area of several million people, but only 300 ,000 people get counted, under 300 ,000 people get counted when you're considering the rates just because of sort of the arbitrary nature of how the borders of the city are drawn. Same with D.C. The administration put out their comparison of D.C.

18:29to, say, Mexico City, a city of, what, 10, 20 times the size of D.C.? So you have to be very careful comparing rates between cities. D.C. does have, if you're looking at, we're going to look at all of the cities of half a million or 250 ,000 or more, D.C. is in the top 10 in terms of murder rate. It's in the top 20 in terms of violent crime rate. So the problem does exist. But you kind of have to be careful. I think that the reason they're focusing on D.C. is probably more of a political one, that this is the place that they can do it rather than this is the place seeing the most crime or the biggest increase in crime.

19:05Yeah, I think that's one of one. That last point is extremely salient, because when Donald Trump lists cities that have that he says have rampant random crime problems, all of them are in blue places. All of them are in blue states. He does not mention cities that are in states that are red states that voted for him, that support him, that may even have higher crime rates than than than D.C. does. And that's because he's trying to make a political point about Democrats, about liberal policies, and about how they, in his opinion, lead to more rampant crime, to an unsafe country. And are there a couple of examples of those types of cities that are in red states but are still seeing higher crime rates than D.C.?

19:49Yeah, I think one of the places, I'm not the expert, but was Memphis, for example, in Tennessee, which may have a little bit more, a higher crime rate than D.C., but has not been mentioned by Trump at all. Jeff, anything to add there? Yeah, I mean, I think that's correct. I'm in New Orleans where New Orleans has a higher murder rate, a higher violent crime rate. New Orleans has also seen dramatic drops in violent crime and murder, but is obviously a state run by a Republican. Memphis is a good example. Well, Memphis's violent crime rate is significantly higher than Washington, D.C.'s, but didn't get a mention.

20:24And its murder rate is significantly higher. And it hasn't seen those things necessarily come down as much after surging in the last five years. To the second question I think you read a little while ago, it's difficult to say Republican versus Democrat cities because the vast majority of big cities are run by Democrats. It's just the way that it is. it's really not a blue-red, I think, comparison. It's happening in blue states. It's happening in red states. We've seen these crime trends occurring everywhere. And what do we know about what's driving the trend in crime reduction in places like Washington, D.C., New York City, other major urban hubs?

21:02We don't really know a lot. And when you want to talk about knowing things, criminologists aren't exactly sure why crime fell in the 90s. So it's very recent to be in a strong position to know exactly why things are falling. I think a lot of people have theories. And when you try to explain this, you kind of have to explain a whole bunch of things. One, it's happening everywhere. Two, it's happening everywhere despite the fact that we haven't seen increases in police officers like in the 90s. Indeed, most places have seen dramatic declines in the number of officers within their ranks in the last three to five years.

21:38It's happening despite the fact that we haven't fixed poverty. People often talk about we have to fix the root causes of crime. We haven't fixed that. We haven't fixed education. The country is still awash in guns. There hasn't been any gun control legislation that has sort of reversed the number of guns that are available. And it really started in 2023. So it's not anything that happened this year. It's not anything that happened last year, even, that's really the main driver. And so the best explanation that kind of incorporates all of that for me is that we kind of spent a lot of money on stuff starting in the immediate post-COVID period, where the federal government invested a lot of money.

22:14It stabilized city budgets. There was enormous increases in local and state government construction on streets and street lighting and neighborhood and social centers and public safety infrastructure. And all of these things that are directly and indirectly tied with crime reduction. In addition, the Department of Justice between 2021 and 2023 increased the budget for grants for communities by a billion dollars. So money going to communities to fund community violence interruption programs. And these programs designed to help rural agencies and with recruiting analysts. How much of that money has survived in the current Trump administration?

22:54Well, it's not exactly clear. A lot of it is money that's spent. Some of it is money that was outstanding grants that was cut recently by the Trump administration when they did the massive cuts to the Office of Justice programs. So it's not exactly clear how much going forward the Department of Justice will be giving out, which is kind of one of the questions that remains is how effective will we be when these crime trends inevitably start to stop going down and maybe start to increase, and that puts us in a worse position. Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more after this break.

23:28Stay with us.

23:35Let's get back to our discussion and add another voice. Richard Brafotte is a professor at Columbia Law School, and he's an expert on state and local governments. Richard, welcome to the program. Happy to join you. So I first want to take a step back because, Cleve, the president says he wants to potentially extend his control of D.C. police. Coming to a city near you. Beyond this 30 days. What would it take for him to maintain control of the police department in D.C.? Uh, TBD. I have some answers, but TBD, right? It would take an act of Congress. It would take Congress approving extending any order.