US President Trump announced in a press conference on Monday, August 11 that he will deploy the National Guard in the United States capital, Washington DC, and take over the city’s police force in an effort to reduce crime.
“Caravans of masked youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day,” Trump claimed, adding that he would be “getting rid of the slums where they live,” without specifying precisely which “slums” he was referring to.
“We will bring in the military if needed,” Trump said, also naming Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland and New York as targets for the deployment of federal forces.
The Trump administration issued an executive order on the same day, declaring a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital. The order puts DC’s police under federal control, and states that the “Attorney General shall regularly update [the president] on the status of the special conditions of an emergency nature that exist in the District of Columbia that require the use of the Metropolitan Police Force for Federal purposes.”
The deployment of 800 National Guard troops to handle law enforcement in DC means a military chain of command is now involved in public safety decisions. According to sources reported by the New York Times, Trump also plans to deploy 150 FBI agents for nighttime patrols in the city.
This has raised the alarm for some civil rights advocates. “Donald Trump has created the fiction of an emergency to turn the nation’s capital into a prototype of a police state. This is intended as a model application. No American city is safe from being placed under federal militarized rule,” says constitutional rights litigator Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “This is a first step in Trump’s march to militarize America’s cities and destroy and subvert democracy.”
DC officials denounce “hyperbolic and false” statements on crime
DC officials have heavily denounced Trump’s approach, with Mayor Muriel Bowser saying on MSNBC on Sunday that the US president’s statements about her city are “hyperbolic and false”.
Crime in DC has gone down recently according to police data. Even in the first half of 2025, crime overall has decreased by 7%, continuing on a downward trend since 2023. In January of this year, the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia announced that according to Metropolitan Police Department data, total violent crime in DC dropped 35% in 2024 compared to 2023, reaching its lowest level in more than three decades.
“The strategy this Office began to employ shortly after I came into this role has been to work with our law enforcement partners to focus on the drivers of violence – those gangs or crews of people who are dealing drugs, protecting turf, committing carjackings and other robberies, all while armed,” then-US Attorney Matthew M. Graves, a Biden appointee, said at the time. “It takes time to develop these investigations and prosecutions, but this is the fruit of that labor – a reduction in the violent crime – that DC is now seeing.”
Five years after federal forces took over Lafayette Square
Trump has already stirred controversy through his deployments of federal forces against people in the US. Trump deployed nearly 5,000 National Guard troops in Los Angeles, California in an effort to quell protests against militarized ICE raids, against the wishes of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
During his first administration, amid the mass uprising in 2020 against police brutality, Trump concentrated forces in Washington, DC, deploying “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults, and the wanton destruction of property,” as he described in a statement.
Perhaps the most memorable of these deployments in 2020 was when federal forces cleared protesters out of Lafayette Square, in central DC, using gas canisters and grenades containing rubber pellets. The state repression cleared the way for Trump to walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church for a three-minute photo op.
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