The President said that the National Guard would be deployed to help “re-establish” law and order.
President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he is invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which would place the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.
“This is Liberation Day in D.C. and we’re taking our capital back,” he said during the press conference, adding that the National Guard would be deployed to help “re-establish” law and order. He said the military could also be called in and announced plans for a crackdown on homelessness in the city.
Trump indicated that imposing federal control in Washington, D.C., would be the first step, noting that cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland also face significant crime problems.
“We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And, this will go further,” he said. “We’re starting very strongly with D.C., and we’re going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say.”
He pointed to the elimination of cash bail as a central problem. “By the way, every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster. That’s what started the problem in New York, and they don’t change it. They don’t want to change it. That’s what started it in Chicago.”
According to the BBC, there were protests outside the White House ahead of the press conference opposing Trump’s pledge to crack down on crime and homelessness in Washington, D.C.
Trump has been portraying crime in the capital as out of control. However, the mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, has disputed that assertion, citing that violent crime has actually been declining over the past two years after a spike in 2023, following the COVID-19 pandemic. To prevent crime in the national capital, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had also started sending in its agents on overnight shifts to help out local law enforcement.
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