Roundup: Trump calls in National Guard to suppress crimes in Washington
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser calls deploying National Guard troops to take over Metropolitan Police Department as announced by U.S. President Donald Trump an "intrusion on our autonomy."
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington to fight crimes, a move that more U.S. cities might see.
"We're taking our capital back," Trump said at a press conference, claiming that the federal government will take over the U.S. capital's police department.
"I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse," Trump said.
Trump's announcement came on the heels of a widely reported assault of a former staffer of the Department of Government Efficiency, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, which occurred earlier this month during an attempted carjacking by juveniles.
Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, blasted the president's takeover of the capital's police department as "political theater."
"His idea in federalizing the police force of D.C. ignores the reality they are making dramatic progress in reducing violent crime in D.C.," Durbin said at a press conference with Democratic members of the Texas state House who traveled to Illinois to block Republicans from pushing for a new congressional district map.
Some statistics indicate that crime levels are going down in U.S. cities.
In 2024, Washington D.C. experienced 112 homicides, according to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department's website. Total violent crime in the district decreased 35 percent from 2023, marking the lowest in over 30 years.
Trump suggested he might later deploy National Guard troops to fight crime in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles.
"We're not going to lose our cities over this," Trump said. "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."
At a press conference later Monday, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that the federal government's takeover of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department was "unsettling" and "unprecedented," calling it an "intrusion on our autonomy."
Regarding Trump's use of the military in domestic affairs, Bowser responded that she does not believe the U.S. military should be used against American citizens on American soil.
It remains to be seen whether city mayors will resist the White House on National Guard deployments in what they believe to be their territory.
"Mayors do not want the national government to take over local police because they lose control of law enforcement. That is true in D.C. as well as other leading cities," Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua.
"We don't know whether this will become a trend, but a number of other places will be following the D.C. deployment carefully to see how it is implemented and what it means for local residents," West said.
Christopher Galdieri, a political science professor with Saint Anselm College, said: "It's possible we'll see other deployments as we did (in Los Angeles) earlier this year."
"There are always ways to fight back, mainly by throwing metaphorical shoes into the bureaucratic machinery," Galdieri said.
Clay Ramsay, a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, told Xinhua that Washington is "a special case." "It has no governor, and the president does have legal authority to use the D.C. National Guard and the D.C. police, not to mention the host of different federal law enforcement entities."
"In other major cities like New York and Chicago, the governor and the mayor acting together may have some options (to resist any National Guard deployment from Trump)," Ramsay said. ■