D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called President Trump’s sweeping crime-fighting takeover in the District on Monday “unsettling and unprecedented” but said she wasn’t surprised.
“I’m going to work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster. Let me put it that way,” she told reporters Monday afternoon — just hours after Trump announced the federal government would take control of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and deploy National Guard troops.
Bowser, who has had a cordial relationship this term with Trump even as the president has blasted District leadership over crime and homeless people living in D.C.’s public spaces, said she was not given a heads up before Trump’s full plan but suspected that he was calling in the National Guard when the president announced a news briefing on D.C. crime.
Trump declared a public safety emergency, paving the way for a temporary takeover of the local police forced under D.C.’s home rule.
“We’re going to work every day to get this emergency put to an end — I’ll call it the ‘so-called emergency,'” Bowser said.
Bowser said she believes Trump’s views of D.C. are “shaped by his COVID-era experience during his first term.”
“It is true that those were more challenging times related to some issues,” she said. “It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-COVID, but we worked quickly to put laws in place and measures that got violent offenders off the streets and gave our police officers more tools, which is why we have seen a huge decrease in crime.”
“We’re at a 30-year violent crime low,” she added.
Trump and his supporters have pushed back on D.C.’s official crime stats that show violent incidents have dropped this year and following the post-COVID-19 surge.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to take it,” Trump told reporters during a White House briefing earlier in the day.
“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” he added.
In addition to pushing back on the president’s depiction of crime in the District, Bowser also tamped down more forceful messaging that Trump’s efforts amount to a direct takeover.
Trump said he had tapped Drug Enforcement Administration head Terry Cole to serve as the federal leader of the MPD. Cole will report to Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Bowser will continue working alongside current police leadership, the mayor said. Bondi and Bowser will coordinate efforts, as Bowser described the arrangement, but she said she is waiting to speak to Bondi directly.
“Let me be clear, as our home rule charter is also clear and the president’s executive order restates: Chief Pamela Smith is the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department and its 3,100 members work under her direction,” she said. “The home rule charter requires the mayor to provide the services of MPD during special conditions of an emergency, and we will follow the law.”
According to the executive order Trump signed, “the Mayor shall provide such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the Attorney General may deem necessary and appropriate.”
Speaking alongside Bowser, Smith said the MPD’s “relationship with our federal partners is not new.”
“We do this on a daily basis,” she said.
But Bowser elaborated on what she views as potentially disastrous outcomes from the federal intervention.
“What could be a disaster is if we lose communities who won’t call the police — that could be a disaster … if communities won’t talk to the police when a crime has been committed and they could help solve that crime — that could be a disaster,” she said.
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