It didn’t take long for Trump to put his plans into action. Days later, at a news conference on Monday, Trump ordered the mobilization of the District of Columbia National Guard and assumed control over the Metropolitan Police Department. He also said that officers with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would patrol D.C. streets. “This is liberation day in D.C. and we’re going to take our capital back,” Trump said, saying the city was in a state “of complete and total lawlessness.”
While it may seem like the decision could be destined for litigation in the courts, like his July deployment of the California National Guard, the situation in Washington is different. Instead of being under the command of a state governor—as is the case with other National Guard unites—D.C. National Guardsmen are federal forces, under the command of the president. Congress passed legislation in 1802 allowing President Thomas Jefferson to form the branch, including a clause stating that the president is “authorized to call them into service” in the same manner as governors of states.
It’s much less clear whether Trump can command similar authority over the city’s police force. Jurisdiction over Washington’s police department has remained with the city’s mayor since Congress passed the D.C. Home Rule Act in 1973. However, that federal law limits when the president may exert temporary control over local law enforcement. Specifically, the president can do so when he “determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for Federal purposes.” In the executive order he issued Monday, Trump determined that a “crime emergency” currently occurring in the nation’s capital met those conditions.
Others disagreed. “There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia,” D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb tweeted later that day, calling the president’s actions “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.”
So the legality of Trump’s police takeover appears to hinge on what constitutes an emergency. “The answer, unfortunately, is it hasn’t been defined,” Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told TMD. The law only states that the president may assume control of city police for up to 30 days if he “determines” that special conditions for an emergency are present. But, as Tribe explained, a federal district court could always step in, “and say, ‘by no reasonable definition is there an emergency in the District of Columbia warranting this kind of takeover.’”
But such a legal fight could stretch all the way to the Supreme Court, which could reconsider 1) whether crime in the city qualifies an emergency and 2) whether courts have the authority to overrule a president’s “determination” of one. How is this likely to play out? A federal district court may consider issuing a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order to pause the move, but ultimately, Tribe said, “You never know what the U.S. Supreme Court will do.”
D.C. officials have said long-term crime statistics show that the city’s crime problem is improving. The district’s non-voting delegate to Congress, Holmes Norton, said in a statement (in which she also called for statehood) that 2024 marked a 30-year low of crime in D.C., and it was down a further 26 percent this year. On January 3, then-D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves provided similar data: “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023,” he said, citing police data. Between 2024 and 2023, he added, “homicides are down 32%; robberies are down 39%; armed carjackings are down 53%; assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27%.”
But a White House fact sheet published Monday paints a grim picture. “Washington, D.C.’s murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba,” it stated. The administration highlighted that the district’s homicide rate grew from 13.9 per 100,000 residents in 2012 to a rate of 27.3 in 2024, and cited analysis from a May report by the Heritage Foundation, which concluded, “If D.C. were a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the United States.” Washington doesn’t fare well compared to major U.S. cities either, with the fourth-highest homicide rate in 2024, the administration added, citing a working paper from the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Public Safety Initiatives.
How do we make sense of these disparities? As data analyst Jeff Asher explained on his Substack, Jeff-alytics: “Multiple things are true.” “Violent crime in DC is down a huge amount from where it was in the early 1990s and down a good bit from where it was a decade ago,” he wrote. “Violent crime in DC fell in 2024 after increasing in 2023, that much is clear from DC’s reporting to the FBI.” Asher added that violent crime in 2025 appears to be declining, though the available data is a “bit murkier.”
So judging whether crime in D.C. is decreasing requires the followup question: “Since when?” Violent crime is less of a problem now than it was in the 1990s, but in 2023, the city recorded its highest homicide rate—38.8 per 100,000 people—in 20 years. “D.C. crime has gone down this year over last year, it’s gone down last year over 2023, but it’s still markedly higher than it was 10 to 15 years ago,” Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and former public defender, told TMD. “D.C. is not an outlier in that,” he added, noting that other major U.S. cities have experienced similar trends.
Are D.C. National Guardsmen and federal agents the solution the city needs? Fox expects they will be ill-equipped to tackle the problem, and that “the results are going to be marginal at best.” As he noted: “Why do we have them doing foot patrols in the National Mall—when you look up the statistics on the National Mall, there’s no actual crime that even occurs there?”
