The Republican president, who said he was formally declaring a public safety emergency, compared crime in the American capital with that in other major cities, saying Washington performs poorly on safety relative to the capitals of Iraq, Brazil and Colombia, among others.
Trump also said at his news briefing that his administration has started removing homeless encampments “from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks”.
“We’re getting rid of the slums, too,” Trump said, adding that the US would not lose its cities and that Washington was just a start.
Attorney General Pam Bondi will be taking over responsibility for Washington’s metro police department, he said, while also complaining about potholes and graffiti in the city and calling them “embarrassing”.
For Trump, the effort to take over public safety in Washington reflects a next step in his law enforcement agenda after his aggressive push to stop illegal border crossings.
But the move involves at least 500 federal law enforcement officials as well as the National Guard, raising fundamental questions about how an increasingly emboldened federal government will interact with its state and local counterparts.
The president has used his social media and White House megaphones to message that his administration is tough on crime, yet his ability to shape policy might be limited outside of Washington, which has a unique status as a congressionally established federal district. Nor is it clear how his push would address the root causes of homelessness and crime.
Trump said he is invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to deploy members of the National Guard.
About 500 federal law enforcement officers are being tasked with deploying throughout the nation’s capital as part of the Trump administration’s effort to combat crime, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Monday (Early Tuesday AEST).
More than 100 FBI agents and about 40 agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are among federal law enforcement personnel being assigned to patrols in Washington, the person briefed on the plans said.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Marshals Service are also contributing officers.
The person was not authorised to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. The Justice Department didn’t immediately have a comment.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, questioned the effectiveness of using the Guard to enforce city laws and said the federal government could be far more helpful by funding more prosecutors or filling the 15 vacancies on the DC Superior Court, some of which have been open for years.
Bowser cannot activate the National Guard herself, but she can submit a request to the Pentagon.
“I just think that’s not the most efficient use of our Guard,” she said on Sunday on MSNBC’s The Weekend, acknowledging it is “the president’s call about how to deploy the Guard”.
Bowser was making her first public comments since Trump started posting about crime in Washington last week. She noted that violent crime in Washington has decreased since a rise in 2023. Trump’s weekend posts depicted the district as “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World”.
For Bowser, “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false”.
Trump in a Sunday social media post had emphasised the removal of Washington’s homeless population, though it was unclear where the thousands of people would go.
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on Sunday.
“We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”
Last week, the Republican president directed federal law enforcement agencies to increase their presence in Washington for seven days, with the option “to extend as needed”.
On Friday night, federal agencies including the Secret Service, the FBI and the US Marshals Service assigned more than 120 officers and agents to assist in Washington.
Trump said last week that he was considering ways for the federal government to seize control of Washington, asserting that crime was “ridiculous” and the city was “unsafe”, after the recent assault of a high-profile member of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Police statistics show homicides, robberies and burglaries are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26 per cent compared with this time a year ago.
Trump offered no details in Truth Social posts over the weekend about possible new actions to address crime levels he argues are dangerous for citizens, tourists and workers alike. The White House declined to offer additional details about Monday’s announcement.
The police department and the mayor’s office did not respond to questions about what Trump might do next.
The president criticised the district as full of “tents, squalor, filth, and Crime”, and he seems to have been set off by the attack on Edward Coristine, among the most visible figures of the bureaucracy-cutting effort known as DOGE. Police arrested two 15-year-olds in the attempted carjacking and said they were looking for others.
“This has to be the best run place in the country, not the worst run place in the country,” Trump said Wednesday.
He called Bowser “a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances”.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that the rule of Washington could be returned to federal authorities. Doing so would require a repeal of the Home Rule Act of 1973 in Congress, a step Trump said lawyers are examining. It could face steep pushback.
Bowser acknowledged that the law allows the president to take more control over the city’s police, but only if certain conditions are met.
“None of those conditions exist in our city right now,” she said.
“We are not experiencing a spike in crime. In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down.”
