Mayor Muriel Bowser disputes Donald Trump’s emergency narrative, citing crime decline; critics call deployment a political power play.
Some of the 800 National Guard members deployed by US President Donald Trump have started arriving in the nation’s capital, ramping up after the White House ordered federal forces to take over the city’s police department and reduce crime in what the president called – without substantiation – a lawless city.
The influx on Tuesday came the morning after Trump announced he would be activating the guard members and taking over the department. He cited a crime emergency – but referred to the same crime that city officials stress is already falling noticeably.
The president holds the legal right to make such moves – to a point.
The law lets Trump control the police department for a month, but how aggressive the federal presence will be and how it could play out remained open questions as the city’s mayor and police chief went to the Justice Department to meet with the attorney general.
The meeting comes a day after Mayor Muriel Bowser said Trump’s freshly announced plan to take over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and call in the National Guard was not a productive step. She calmly laid out the city’s case that crime has been dropping steadily and said Trump’s perceived state of emergency simply doesn’t match the numbers.
She also flatly stated that the capital city’s hands are tied and that her administration has little choice but to comply. “We could contest that,” she said of Trump’s definition of a crime emergency, “but his authority is pretty broad.”
Bowser made a reference to Trump’s “so-called emergency” and concluded: “I’m going to work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster.”
Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from Washington, DC, said Trump has accused Democrats of being “weak on crime”.
“He singled out Democrat-run cities like Oakland – which is outside San Francisco – New York, Baltimore, even Chicago,” she said. “Given the fact they’re run by Democrats … this is causing a little bit of concern.”
Democrats are calling the move “a power grab”.
“Even though they’re saying this is technically legal, it is a hostile takeover given that these powers have actually never been executed in modern history,” Halkett said.
Trump’s bumpy relationship with DC
While Trump invokes his plan by saying that “we’re going to take our capital back”, Bowser and the MPD maintain that violent crime overall in Washington has decreased to a 30-year low after a sharp rise in 2023.
Carjackings, for example, dropped about 50 percent in 2024 and are down again this year. More than half of those arrested, however, are juveniles, and the extent of those punishments is a point of contention for the Trump administration.
“The White House says crime may be down, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem and that violent crime exists at levels that are far too high,” Halkett said.
Bowser, a Democrat, spent much of Trump’s first term in office openly sparring with the Republican president. She fended off his initial plans for a military parade through the streets and stood in public opposition when he called in a multi-agency flood of federal law enforcement to confront anti-police brutality protesters in the summer of 2020.
She later had the words “Black Lives Matter” painted in giant yellow letters on the street about a block from the White House.
In Trump’s second term, backed by Republican control of both houses of Congress, Bowser has walked a public tightrope for months, emphasising common ground with the Trump administration on issues such as the successful effort to bring the National Football League’s (NFL’s) Washington Commanders back to the District of Columbia.
She watched with open concern for the city streets as Trump finally got his military parade this summer. Her decision to dismantle Black Lives Matter Plaza earlier this year served as a neat metaphor for just how much the power dynamics between the two executives had evolved.
Now that fraught relationship enters uncharted territory as Trump has followed through on months of what many DC officials had quietly hoped were empty threats. The new standoff has cast Bowser in a sympathetic light, even among her longtime critics.
“It’s a power play and we’re an easy target,” said Clinique Chapman, CEO of the DC Justice Lab. A frequent critic of Bowser, whom she accuses of “over policing our youth” with the recent expansions of Washington’s youth curfew, Chapman said Trump’s latest move “is not about creating a safer DC; it’s just about power”.
