Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

Summary

President Trump on Monday took federal control of the police force in the nation’s capital for 30 days and mobilized 800 National Guard troops to fight crime in a city that he claimed was overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals,” even though crime numbers in Washington are falling.During a 78-minute news conference, during which he was flanked by several members of his cabinet, Mr. Trump took the lectern in the White House briefing room and said he also intended to clear out the capital’s homeless population, without saying how officials would do it, or detailing where those people would go.Armed with papers that showed crime statistics, Mr. Trump decried murders in Washington compared with other global cities but ignored the fact that violent crime has fallen recently in the nation’s capital. While the violent crime rate surged in 2023, it fell 35 percent from that year to 2024, according to the city’s Metropolitan Police Department. A chart shows the number of violent crimes in Washington, D.C. from January 1 to August 10 each year from 2010 to 2025. Violent crimes have declined from a peak of nearly 3,300 in the 2023 time span to fewer than 1,600 in 2025, lower than pre-pandemic levels. 1,584 violent crimes in 2025 so far 1,584 violent crimes in 2025 so far Instead, Mr. Trump painted Washington as an urban hellscape, repurposing some of the incendiary language he has used to describe conditions at the southern border. Mr. Trump has railed against crime in urban, largely liberal cities for decades, but his announcement on Monday was an extraordinary exertion of federal power over an American city. Warning of “caravans of mass youth” rampaging the city streets and relaying stories of children caught in shootings, Mr. Trump blamed Democrats for allowing the crime.“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re not going to let it happen anym...