On August 3, someone was shot about five blocks from my house in Washington, DC. Just two nights before, we had called 911 because of gunfire nearby—not an unusual occurrence. A week later, someone was murdered six or seven blocks away, in broad daylight. My neighborhood also has the usual urban scourges: porch pirates, the CVS where everything is under lock and key, the ATV drivers who roar up and down the street doing wheelies and terrorizing motorists and pedestrians alike.
President Donald Trump has recently decided he would save us from all this. Last week, he moved to federalize DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and sent hundreds of federal officers and National Guard soldiers into the city. Dozens of masked thugs arrived in my neighborhood, where they set up traffic checkpoints, abducted delivery drivers, and marched up and down the sidewalk in tactical gear, while confused residents and restaurant patrons looked on or called them fascists.
Waking up and discovering that in 2025 America, you live in a police state is deeply unsettling. (I’ll take the ATV riders any day, thank you very much.) It feels a little too similar to places like Argentina, circa 1974, as if we are just one sandwich-throw away from having these troops violently unleashed on people opposed to the regime. And, far from making us safer, it seems clear that this ill-conceived federal “crackdown” will ultimately make crime in DC worse—and might get some people killed.
“Virtually everything the administration is doing is pro-crime,” Elliot Currie, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, says of Trump’s federal takeover. “It’s counterproductive and represents another tentacle of the creeping authoritarianism.”
The author of A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America, Currie seemed the right person to reach out to as some 850 new federal officers and National Guardsmen fanned out across the city, with hundreds more on the way from red states eager to join the occupation. He had many “unhappy thoughts” about what was happening in DC. “This is not going to work out well down the road,” he warned. “They’re sowing some bad seeds here—almost as if they’re trying to do it.”
“They’re sowing some bad seeds here—almost as if they’re trying to do it.”
Reducing crime, especially violent crime, Currie told me, requires a lot more work than just sending a bunch of FBI desk-jockeys in tactical gear to wander around the city hassling weed smokers. Consider one of MPD’s most chronic failures: Solving murders. There were 187 murders in DC in 2024, and a lot of those killers are getting away with it.
Last year, the DC homicide clearance rate—the share of cases that end in an arrest or are otherwise solved—was a dismal 60 percent, which, shockingly, is slightly better than the national average of 58 percent. It was even worse in 2023, when the city had a particularly bad surge in murders, and local police cleared barely 50 percent of the cases.
“Some of the mechanisms by which we catch these people in the first place have weakened in recent years,” says Currie. Usually, a crime is solved because “someone talks,” he explains. “But if any sort of trust or rapport between law enforcement and the community breaks down completely— as it has in many places—it makes it much harder to find who did it.”
DC residents have long had a contentious relationship with MPD, and the federal invasion is no doubt making it worse. “What Trump is doing is destroying relationships with cops and people who live here,” Currie says. If the administration really wanted to help lower the murder rate, he notes, it would address the low clearance rates. But to do that, you can’t just trade community work and sensitive policing for “those nine guys standing on the corner looking uncomfortable.”
By starving communities of the violence prevention, behavioral health services, and other investments that young people in particular need to flourish, Currie says, “We’re priming ourselves for another spike in crime.”
That is, of course, exactly what Trump has done. In April, his administration arbitrarily cancelled nearly 400 grants worth more than $800 million from the US Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs. The vast majority focused on violence prevention, community safety, and juvenile justice programs. In DC, local organizations involved in violence reduction lost more than $500,000.
Currie’s kumbaya approach to communities, of course, doesn’t lend itself to dramatic White House propaganda videos. Trump wants to take the cuffs off the police so they can bust some heads on TV. “They’re not allowed to do anything,” he complained at a press conference in early August. “But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want. They fight back until you knock the hell out of them.”
Trump had signaled his intention to unshackle cops in DC just three days into his second administration, when he pardoned two MPD officers who in 2020 engaged in an unauthorized chase of 20-year-old scooter-rider Karon Hylton-Brown. Hylton-Brown was killed by a car while fleeing the police. “They were arrested, put in jail for five years because they went after an illegal,” Trump falsely claimed after the pardon. (Hylton-Brown was born in DC.) “They arrested the two officers and put them in jail for going after a criminal.”
In fact, a jury had convicted Terrence Sutton of second-degree murder and both officers of obstruction of justice for covering up their actions. Sutton was sentenced to more than five years in prison, and his fellow officer got more than four years. Following Trump’s pardon, MPD Chief Pamela Smith reinstated them and allowed them to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay, in defiance of the department’s disciplinary recommendation.
Hylton-Brown’s case shows why MPD restricts actions like police chases—they can be deadly. These guardrails can be frustrating for cops and residents alike, especially if you live along the dirt-bike corridor as I do. I have watched, enraged, as police stood by and did nothing as dozens of ATV drivers took over the road, gleefully—and recklessly—violating every traffic law on the books. Yet my neighbors and I understand that chasing ATV riders through our densely populated streets, lined with “streateries” full of outdoor diners, would be a good way to get someone killed.
MPD gets this, too. So instead, they’ve mostly attacked the problem with quotidian shoe-leather investigations, tracking suspects identified through security footage. They’ve offered rewards for tips and conducted even more thankless “unregistered vehicle enforcement.” It seems to be effective. I used to be able to set my watch by the ATV riders who barreled down 14th Street every Sunday around 5 pm, but they have been scarce in recent months.
Yet the new Trump troops are already ditching MPD’s constraints on car chases. Residents in a Northwest neighborhood reported to a local blog that Saturday night, federal officers pursued a driver in an allegedly stolen car. The fleeing vehicle sped through a narrow residential street, hit a speed bump, and flipped, hitting two parked vans in the process. The driver seems to have fled and, despite the presence of more than a dozen law enforcement vehicles from the FBI and the US Park Police, he got away. Miraculously, no one but a passenger in the car seems to have been injured.
“So instead of 1 stolen vehicle we have 1 totaled vehicle, another damaged, risked the lives of everyone on the streets of the chase, deployed all these officers and equipment ($$$), and still may not get the suspect,” a witness wrote. “Seems worth it.”
Shortly after Trump’s federal takeover of DC law enforcement, the White House held a press conference to brag about its first day successes. Among the 23 arrests White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt touted was one for “fare evasion.”
Failing to pay a transit fare in DC is not a crime. It’s a civil offense punishable by a $50 citation. Someone can be arrested for refusing to provide ID, so transit cops can issue the ticket, but it doesn’t happen often. On Monday, for instance, transit cops stopped about 70 people for fare evasion—out of about 410,000 riders—and only one of them was arrested.
Conservatives no doubt view this as yet another sign that our liberal city is soft on crime. But criminalizing fare evasion tended to over-police young Black men and homeless people. It also didn’t work all that well in getting people to pay their fares, a problem that had skyrocketed during the pandemic.
Rather than go to war with the fare jumpers, creative transit officials recently tried a simpler solution: they just put up taller fare gates in the subway that are much harder to hurdle. Fare evasion has dropped more than 80 percent, even as ridership has gone up. Now, transit police can focus on more serious crimes. In December, for instance, a transit cop arrested a man who refused to pay his bus fare after he discovered the man was carrying a loaded shotgun under his coat.
Fortunately, this happened before Trump’s new crime crackdown. Today, that armed man on the bus would have gone free because this week, federal prosecutors were ordered not to bring felony charges against people carrying shotguns or rifles in the city. Before Trump took over, crime in the Metro system had dropped to its lowest level since 2018, which might explain why the National Guard officers now patrolling it look so bored.
“You can have a massive police presence that you put in the communities, and you can let the cops behave very badly with people, mostly young people of color. They can really show some impressive optics when they do this.”
The idea of “unleashing the police” is seductive to politicians like Trump, Currie says, because it can result in a reduction of certain types of street crimes—in the short term. “You can have a massive police presence that you put in the communities, and you can let the cops behave very badly with people, mostly young people of color,” he says. “They can really show some impressive optics when they do this.”
He points to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has made a great show of cracking down on crime, indiscriminately throwing poor people in the notorious CECOT prison and earning the enduring love of America’s right-wing politicians. “History tells us you can never sustain this for very long,” Currie says. “And that doesn’t even consider the ethical, moral implications of turning your society into that.”
Of course, Trump’s takeover was never really about making DC safer. There’s no better evidence of that than the Hero We Need—i.e., Sean Charles Dunn, the U Street clubgoer who, earlier this month, threw a submarine sandwich at a Border Patrol agent decked out in war gear.
The video makes clear just how useless many of these agents are. They lumber after the apparently very drunk man, who sprints away and evades them for blocks before they finally apprehend him. Dunn was processed that night at the Third District police station and appeared in DC Superior Court the next day, where the charges were dropped.
Two days later, embarrassed Trump officials obtained a new arrest warrant for him in federal court. Then they sent a half-dozen US Marshals, complete with riot shield, on a nighttime “raid” to “re-arrest” the dangerous sub-tosser at his Foggy Bottom apartment, with the cameras rolling. The White House posted the footage on social media under the heading “Operation Making DC Safe Again Edition.”
The video of the agents protecting DC from the hoagie-throwing former Justice Department lawyer was not particularly dramatic. Dunn was charged with a felony, released, and is scheduled to appear in court on September 4.
On Sunday night, a gaggle of federal agents was spotted patrolling the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. Dave Statter, a local who monitors DC police and EMS radio, noted on X that the last time he’d heard an EMS call from the Mall had been two days earlier—for a heat stroke victim. Meanwhile, now that Trump has ordered MPD to help Border Patrol officers protect the city from DoorDash drivers, Statter said it took 90 minutes that night for DC cops to respond to a car crash on I-295, leaving the fire department to try to manage traffic with a ladder truck.
The newly arrived federal troops seem extremely reluctant to venture into parts of DC that are dangerous. Despite the sporadic gunfire in my Ward 2 neighborhood, which includes most of downtown and is more than 60 percent white, there have been just four homicides this year there. Across the river, by contrast, there’ve been 38 murders in poor, majority-Black Ward 8—a homicide rate more than eight times that of Ward 2.
At a White House press conference Tuesday, Leavitt claimed that of the 450 arrests supposedly made as part of Trump’s DC takeover, nearly half of the non-immigration related arrests took place in Ward 7 and 8, “where we know there’s the highest rate of crime.”
The White House has refused to release the details of those arrests, but there’s good reason to be skeptical. Federal stormtroopers seem barely visible where the most crime is. Late Monday night, for instance, three people were shot in two different episodes along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, a well-known hot spot. But community members and reporters on the scene noted that not a single federal agent was on hand to intervene.
The shootings, however, illustrate why Trump may still be winning the propaganda war. The city’s official response to Trump’s federal invasion has fixated on the fact that DC’s crime rate has fallen recently and therefore is not facing a crisis demanding this kind of federal intervention. “Violent crime in DC is at its lowest level in 30 years,” DC Mayor Muriel Bowser insisted. That defensive crouch seemed to miss the point.
Despite the recent decline, the city’s homicide rate, like much of the country’s, is still shockingly high, particularly in certain neighborhoods. “There is no city in the advanced industrial world that looks like that,” Currie says. “You have to go to Brazil, Jamaica, South Africa to find that kind of homicide rate.” And, he adds, “since we haven’t dealt with the underlying roots of the problem, there’s nothing to keep it from spiking up again two years, 10 years from now.”
This fact has not been lost on Trump supporters. “You tell the mother of the intern who was shot going out for McDonald’s near the Washington Convention Center, ‘Oh, crime is down,’” former Fox News host turned DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro told reporters recently.
Liberals, Currie says, have been “trying to whitewash a terrible problem that is felt most deeply by the most vulnerable people in our society.” Unfortunately, what Trump is doing, he says, “is precisely the wrong way to try to tackle it.”
