Trump Says D.C. Is Now ‘Crime Free.’ What’s The Reality?

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Sarah McCammon.

I cover politics.

I'm Ryan Lucas.

I cover the Justice Department.

And Alex Coma of member station WAMU in D.C.

is here in studio as well.

Hi, Alex.

Welcome.

Great to be here.

Today on the podcast, we're talking about the federal government's takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., and what's really going on with all those arrests the White House keeps talking about.

Alex, you've been out on the streets of D.C.

reporting for several weeks now.

Just tell us what you've been seeing and how does it look different than it would normally look here?

Yeah, you know, as someone who's lived in D.C.

through presidential inaugurations, through, you know, all sorts of big events, the huge Fourth of July parades, you know, we see cops on the street all the time.

We see specifically even federal, you know, officers and troops on the street.

It is not exactly the most uncommon thing in D.C., but this is a difference of degrees, right?

Because now we have the National Guard in here, which is, you know, very novel for the city.

They sometimes secure things like the inauguration, but they certainly aren't around in our train stations, our subway stations, where they are now pretty much a constant presence.

They're largely just standing around as far as we can see, but nonetheless, still very different for us.

And the truly novel thing here is not just seeing federal law enforcement officers like the FBI, ICE, you know, your alphabet soup of agencies, but seeing them taking an active role in, you know, enforcing the law, stopping people on the streets, whether that's traffic stops for immigration purposes, which we have seen a tremendous number of, often in concert with our local police, stopping and checking people's immigration status.

That is all very new.

That does not generally happen in D.C.

Or you're seeing these

federal agents who are assisting local police for something as simple as like fare evasion, which we have seen a lot of stops for.

This is not stuff that in the past we have generally seen the feds intervene, even though they do have quite a large presence, this being the nation's capital after all.

We've We've also seen checkpoints set up by a mix of MPD and federal agents, which is not something that we are accustomed to seeing in the city.

It's not something that you normally see, even during big events such as inaugurations and the other stuff that Alex mentioned.

Yeah, our local police were, in fact, very limited up until recently in what they were allowed to do to work with federal immigration officers.

That has proven to be a huge part of the fight between the president and city leaders here: how much our local police can get involved in these these immigration actions.

You know, yesterday President Trump claimed that D.C.

is now a crime-free zone, as he put it.

And he said there is virtually no crime in the city after the addition of all of these federal law enforcement officers.

Alex, what's the reality?

Is there crime in the city normally?

And how does what's happening now compare to, again, the baseline?

Aaron Powell, yes, believe it or not, there is still crime in D.C.

Now, that's not to minimize any of this because, look, you you know, in the pandemic, D.C.

saw a spike in crime that a lot of other major cities did.

And unlike other major cities, which saw those levels return to normal, 2023 was actually one of the most violent years in the city since the bad old days of the 1990s, which were associated with the crack cocaine epidemic when the city was a very violent place.

You know, these levels that the city is experiencing are unusual.

And so it does bear, you know, highlighting that.

However, on a slightly delayed timeline, the city started to see those levels return to normal, where maybe the number of shootings and murders are still higher than they used to be in the city 10 years ago, but they're coming back to what would be considered more normal for most people.

And I think it's also worth highlighting that as ever, the crime in the city is concentrated in, sadly, the same places where it always has been, which is historically disinvested black communities.

So as we are talking about crime, I think it is worth keeping in the back of our minds that it is not evenly distributed throughout the city.

It is affecting some communities, especially acutely.

And I think that that often gets lost in the conversations, especially when the president is highlighting this issue.

Now, Ryan, you've been looking at court records.

What can you tell us about who's being arrested and for what alleged crimes?

Right.

So I started looking into this because we have not gotten clarity and transparency out of the White House or the administration generally on who's being arrested, names, case numbers, the sorts of things that we would want to know in order to verify what it is they're saying and have a better understanding of who's being arrested and what for.

So what I did was start looking at court records and as well as some other information that I could gather through the course of reporting.

This is not looking at immigration.

people who have been arrested on immigration offenses.

That's a separate bucket looking just at people who are going through D.C.

Superior Court, which is basically people who are being charged with local offenses, and then the federal court here in D.C.

And I looked at a specific timeframe, which is the first two weeks since President Trump federalized the Washington Police Department.

And what I found is there were roughly a little more than 1,000 people went through D.C.

Superior Court.

Of those, around 20% were for felonies, so for more serious crimes.

The rest were a mix of misdemeanors, traffic offenses, some sort of warrant, or cases that prosecutors decided not to pursue.

They decided to drop.

What was particularly interesting on that last point is that there were 17% in the first week of cases that the U.S.

Attorney's Office here in D.C.

decided not to pursue.

The second week, that number dropped to less than 1%.

So there was some decision that was made in the U.S.

Attorney's Office about how they're going to approach those cases.

What it means is that ultimately there are flaws with some of these cases, and that's why the U.S.

Attorney's Office normally decides not to pursue them.

Those flaws haven't suddenly gone away, so there was some decision made here.

Ultimately, judges or grand juries are going to have to deal with those issues.

So they're pursuing just about everything these days?

Just about everything these days.

That's right.

At the Superior Court level.

Now, I also looked at cases that have been brought in federal court, and this is where things get very interesting.

There were 35 cases that I could look at over that two-week time period.

A little more than half are for gun or drug offenses.

One case, for example, a guy was pulled over for not using his blinker, essentially, but officers found 150 grams of cocaine base in his car, as well as weapons.

Now, he was arrested for guns and drugs.

The second most common offense that we saw was for what's impeding, assaulting, resisting officers, essentially kind of resisting arrest.

Some of those cases seem very kind of run-of-the-mill.

Somebody hit a federal agent trying to escape and arrest at a gas station.

But we've also seen cases where, for example, famous case that we've talked about, a man threw a sub sandwich at a federal officer in D.C.

And another instance, a man allegedly spat at members of the National Guard by Union Station, arrested on a federal offense.

The kind of harassment you see of law enforcement officers, but the kind of thing that might not normally be a federal offense.

Might not normally be a federal offense, but the U.S.

Attorney's Office is treating everything at the most serious level.

They're pursuing it in the most serious charges that they can.

What I will say is that we've started to see some pushback on these sorts of offenses that the U.S.

Attorney's Office is pursuing.

And I say that because in one of the gun cases, a judge dismissed the case and said that the search was the most illegal search he's ever seen in his life.

We've also seen grand juries refusing to indict in some of these cases, the case of the man who threw the sub sandwich being one example, which means you have pushback from

judges, from grand juries, basically saying that we're seeing things be overcharged and we're seeing arguably overreach on the part of federal authorities.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And I think an important bit of context to throw in here is, you know, who the U.S.

Attorney in D.C.

is.

D.C.

is not a state.

We do not have a local prosecutor that manages these crimes.

It is in this case, confirmed by the Senate, picked by the president, Janine Pirro, a former Fox News host and close political ally of the president.

She has been very vocal that she has wanted to, you know, be perceived as, you know, going hand in glove with Trump's crackdown on crime in the city.

And I think that is exactly related to everything that you're seeing here.

She has pledged to take more of these cases federal.

Prosecutors in this city do have the discretion to charge things locally or move them up to federally where they do have much more stringent sentences.

But that requires getting a grand jury to, as you say, move forward and convict them.

And that's not to say that there aren't problems with cases in the past.

It's actually been a huge point of tension between local police here and prosecutors with the tactics they use to search people and get guns off the street.

Many of those sorts of searches have been thrown out of court.

So this sort of thing happens.

I don't want to make it seem like it's only happening now, but the difference is, as Ryan's laying out, it's whether prosecutors are seeing this evidence and deciding to move forward with the case anyway versus thinking to themselves, hey, a grand jury might not go for this, a judge might decide to throw this out in court, that might taint our case against somebody.

That is a really stark change compared to what we've seen before.

Does the federal government have a greater role in crime in D.C.

on a normal day before all of this?

So there is no district attorney here,

as Alex was kind of laying out, as there are in other cities.

It's the U.S.

Attorney's Office that deals with both local crimes as well as federal crimes.

So you can get a big case in federal court here.

That's going to be handled by the U.S.

Attorney's Office.

You can get a little kind of petty crime case that's going to be handled in D.C.

Superior Court.

That will also be handled by the U.S.

Attorney's Office.

D.C.

is unique in this way.

You don't have other cities across the country where you have the U.S.

Attorney's Office doing both local crimes as well as federal crimes.

All right, we're going to take a quick break.

We'll have more in just a moment.

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And we're back.

Yesterday, D.C.

Mayor Muriel Bowser issued an executive order requiring the local government to coordinate with federal law enforcement, even after President Trump's 30-day emergency order expires.

Alex, I want to talk to you about Mayor Bowser.

She is the Democratic mayor of a very democratic city, and she's having to interact a lot with President Trump right now.

What kind of pressure is she under?

Yeah, since Trump's reelection, she's really had to walk a difficult tightrope because on the one hand, D.C.

is not a state, and moreover, the small amount of self-governance that the city does have is only guaranteed by Congress.

So that means that if the president and the Congress are determined enough, they can rescind it and return full control of the city's government to the feds, as it used to be decades ago.

That is not something that pretty much anybody in the city wants, and certainly that the mayor does not want.

And she has said repeatedly that her North Star is preventing that type of interference.

And I think even before all this stuff started, shortly after Trump's reelection, you saw Muriel Bowser doing what she could to, you know, avoid antagonizing the president.

You know, for instance, she preemptively removed Black Lives Matter Plaza, the big, showy, you know, art display she had installed right in view of the White House back in 2020.

You know, she takes that down without being directed by the president, but just because she knew it was something he very much wanted.

And of course, you know, Bowser also wants to avoid Trump's interference for plans in a new football stadium, which is a project that he is certainly very interested in, but she very much wants to maintain her vision for and not his.

So all of this has been going on for months.

She's really been hoping to avoid pretty much exactly the scenario we're in now, where Trump has taken control of the police department and sent federal officials into the city.

So she finds herself here where now she has to, in her view, keep playing nice with the president in order to

not see him go after full self-governance in the city, while also, you know, keeping in the back of her mind that she's up for re-election next year should she decide to run again.

And there are many, many, many Democrats whose vote that she needs to rely on to win office again.

So she is trying to show that she is welcoming what she perceives as the good parts of these interference, getting more federal officers on the street, while standing up to the thing she views as the bad parts, i.e.

massed ICE agents, you know, taking people off the street for not committing any crime other than being here illegally.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: As I understand it, the Washington Police Department and the mayor's office think that MPD is short of officers, several hundred officers.

So is this an instance where there are certain aspects of what the president is doing in Washington, D.C.

that Mayor Bowser doesn't like, but she welcomes these resources because crime ultimately falls on her to fight in the city and to make residents feel safe.

So is this a way of kind of having those extra resources without having to pay for them?

Absolutely.

I mean, she views this as sort of a, you know, kill two birds with one stone situation because she gets to placate Trump while also getting something that she wants, which, as you say, are more cops on the street.

She has long been among the D.C.

politicians saying that the city needs something like 4,000 officers, which it did once have.

Right now it's at about 3,200.

So you can see the gap there.

There are a lot of people who don't think D.C.

needs more cops.

There was a study by the D.C.

auditor ordered by our local council here that said, you know, D.C.

has a lot of police.

It's just not using them the most efficiently it could be.

It could be doing other things to retain the police that it's constantly churning through, which is a huge issue.

So yes, this serves the mayor's, you know, short and long-term political goals by talking like this.

And the question that she and many of her allies are now needing to answer is, how much does it harm my re-election prospects should she choose to run again if she is perceived as being too welcoming to all this help from Trump.

How do DC residents that you're talking with feel about what's going on right now, Alex?

I think that the vast majority feel, even if they have anxieties about crime in the city, that they feel that this is not the method that they would see

anyone pursue to address it.

Their sort of concern is, hey, sure, maybe some extra help from the feds isn't a bad thing, but why is the president stepping in to say he can run the local police department better than the mayor who we elected to do that and the police chief that she appointed?

I think that, you know, there are some people who have welcomed this.

I don't want to discount them.

A recent Washington Post poll found that it was something like seven in ten residents disagreed with Trump's actions in the city.

So, you know, most people, but certainly not all of them.

And this goes for especially neighborhoods where violent crime is especially prevalent.

But you talk to most people who are in southeast, northeast D.C., where shootings are much more common, and they've said, we need help, but it's not this.

It's not troops on our streets.

It's investments in programs that address the root causes of crime.

Things that Trump and the Republican Congress have been busy cutting to the bone in many cases.

So I think that even as some people can say, hey, our city isn't perfect.

There's crime like every city, they wonder why it is stepping in on DC's very limited autonomy already to do this sort of thing versus trusting our local representatives.

And have you been talking to any police officers in DC as well?

Like, do you have a sense of how the federal takeover is viewed by members of the DC police force?

Yeah, the mood within the department is very mixed at this point.

Because on the one hand, you do have some very pro-Trump officers, as exemplified by the head of the police union.

He's very vocally pro-Trump and has welcomed this federal intervention.

And, you know, they are part of a contingent who has felt that the D.C.

Council has sort of gone too far with reforms in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

But I also think that there's another contingent saying, I signed up for this job because I wanted to work for the mayor and the chief to serve my community, not for the president, especially not for a president who was calling rioters to the Capitol on January 6th, who then assaulted a lot of my colleagues.

And I'd say that no matter where you come down on it within the department, the number one feeling is confusion because the messaging has been muddled.

Now, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about one other issue that's been a major priority for President Trump, and that is homelessness.

What is the latest on federal efforts to clear homeless encampments?

And what do we know about where those people may be going?

Yeah, so Trump has made homelessness one of his, alongside crime, he's sort of smushed the two very different issues together, largely because it's the sort of thing that he sees.

He often speaks about going out to his golf course in Virginia and seeing homeless camps on the way out of the city into Virginia.

And what's ironic is that the city has kind of largely been embracing his approach for years before any of this ever started.

They've been aggressively moving to clear homeless camps that have popped up in the wake of COVID when you saw a lot of people have a lot of economic insecurity forced out of their homes.

The city's been trying to get them inside with varying degrees of success.

You know, the city has programs to help the homeless that have various levels of funding.

And so a lot of times they're clearing these camps, not able to get people into stable housing.

And then you just see people back out on the street anyway.

So Trump comes along.

and is essentially urging them to do more of what they've been doing.

So they have been trying to do so in concert with the feds.

At this point, they think, based on a recent survey of people living outside, is that they've been able to reduce the number of people living in camps and get more people into shelter.

They've made some moves to sort of expand their emergency shelter capacity.

But look, homeless advocates are telling me all the time shelters are full to the brim.

The city can make these changes, you know, maybe on the margins, but winter is right around the corner when more people are going to be seeking shelter.

So in terms of where people are going,

hopefully some of it is indeed into shelter.

But by and large, I think that it is just moving people around.

I'll give a good example at the MLK Library, a huge gathering spot for homeless people because that's a place where you can get a lot of government services.

Federal agents working in concert with local police, they cleared everybody out of there.

I was there a day or two ago.

There's a ton of people back there.

They don't have anywhere else to go.

So, I think what you're seeing is a lot of just moving people around the city, not really creating permanent answers here.

The administration says that they have cleared 50 homeless encampments.

And this kind of jibes with what Alex was saying is that from what I have heard is that people don't really know where everyone has gone, but there has been a scattering.

People have scattered.

Where they eventually end up is something that we're just going to have to wait and see.

Now, this order, this emergency order is set to expire soon, right?

Yes, September 10th, theoretically, but Trump has said that he would ask Congress to extend it.

That's how the law works, is that he would have to go to them, and they would say that this emergency situation continues.

He can keep control of the the local police.

But he has also threatened to just continue it unilaterally and that would set up some sort of legal fight.

And of course, his control of federal officers and the National Guard, many fewer guardrails on that.

So it's really a very open question how much longer this goes on.

And I'll also add that the president has obviously talked about potentially sending in the National Guard into Baltimore, into Chicago,

a surge of resources to those cities as well to deal with what he says are problems with crime in those locations as well.

So, whether that will have any sort of bearing on what they end up doing in DC, we'll see.

All right, we'll leave it there for today.

Thanks for joining us, Alex.

Oh, so great to be here.

I'm Sarah McCammon.

I cover politics.

I'm Ryan Lucas.

I cover the Justice Department.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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