As the beginning of his second term waxed into the summer of 2025, President Donald Trump took federal control of Washington, D.C.’s police force. Arguing that the crime rate has been rising, President Trump pronounced the state of D.C. a public safety emergency endangering government officials and inhibiting their capacity to do their work.
Officials and residents in D.C. have responded negatively to Trump’s act, according to PBS. Multiple lawsuits have challenged its legality, and many opponents argue that his statistics were outdated and misleading. They have pointed out that the crime rate has been falling overall since 1990, with D.C.’s Metropolitan Police reporting that crime fell by 15% in 2024 and 10% in 2025.
Since Trump’s takeover of D.C., crime has dropped, though detractors do not attribute the shift to the takeover. Michael Holscher, a resident of the city, discussed how locals felt betrayed by the crackdown.
“It feels unnecessary,” Holscher said. “It risks damaging trust in the city while not really solving the deeper issues.”
Trump’s D.C. control turned to deportation of non-citizens, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reporting the arrest of 189 illegal immigrants and notices of inspection for 187 businesses in May. This was in the interest of lowering crime rates, according to executive order 14333 “Declaring a Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia” from August; however, it left many like Holscher questioning the takeover.
“A few weeks ago, I was leaving my home and saw three masked agents forcibly detaining a food delivery worker without questioning and taking him away in an unmarked vehicle,” Holscher said. “My neighbors were asking the masked agents to identify themselves and the authority they had to take these actions, with no response. I’m not sure that’s the kind of country most citizens want to live in.”
Holscher noted that the takeover impacted his everyday life in the city, commenting that it changed the city’s mood as thousands protested the takeover. He believes that, while there was a drop in violent crime, it won’t last long beyond the occupation.
“There were some reports of crime dipping right after,” Holscher said. “But the trade-off was a lot of people feeling uncomfortable, more tension on the streets, more worries about rights and freedoms.”
David Butts has worked on mayoral, congressional, and gubernatorial campaigns as a political consultant in Austin. He attributed the ease with which Trump was able to exert authority in the capital due to its physical and official ties to the federal government, and he suggested one of Trump’s aims was to normalize this type of action.
“D.C. is not a state, so Trump has more leeway as to his actions,” Butts said. “Using the military to do functions clearly that are of a local nature is a harbinger of military use against civilians in the future.”
Since D.C. was made the U.S. capitol in 1790, it has enjoyed limited self-determination, protected by the 1973 Home Rule Act. However, Congress is the ultimate authority over the district, which holds a unique status of centralized federal power yet no federal representation.
“It felt less about making people safer and more about sending a message,” Holscher said. “And the thing is, if the federal government had just given D.C. the resources it spent on this whole operation, the city could probably have reached the same results without losing control of its own police force.”
Michael Mosser, an associate professor of Instruction in the Department of Government and the International Relations and Global Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin, echoed Holscher’s sentiment that other factors may have been at play. Additionally, he pointed out signs the move was less about controlling crime and more about sending a message.
“Short term, this will have limited effects,” Mosser said. “The troops in place in Washington are not necessarily in places that are actually suffering from high crime rates. Long term, the action has the potential to weaken even further the notion of separation of powers and the notion of posse comitatus, which essentially means keeping military forces out of policing.”
Trump’s federalization of the D.C. police force and deployment of the National Guard was unprecedented. The Home Rule Act reserves the president this power in times of an emergency, and this is the first instance of its implementation.
“Presidents have often sought to expand their powers without the hindrance of legislative and judicial oversight,” Butts said. “The original concept of our governmental structure was to prevent governing by fiat. The so-called ‘checks and balances’–this is being overrun by Trump.”
On Sept. 11, Trump’s control over D.C.’s police force and local deployment of the National Guard ended. Trump has threatened to take control over D.C. again due to their unwillingness to cooperate with ICE, and he suggested imposing similar policies on Chicago, Illinois, and Memphis, Tennessee.
“Overall, I think this is yet more evidence of a maximalist view of executive branch power, and is likely to recede regardless of who is in power,” Mosser said.