Trump Is Taking Over the D.C. Police Department. The Mayor’s Plan? ‘Follow the Law.’

Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., indicated on Monday that she did not plan to openly challenge President Donald Trump’s decision to take control of the city’s police force under the guise of a “crime emergency,” telling reporters that she and other city officials planned to “follow the law” in complying with the White House’s orders.

Bowser opened her press conference by calling Trump’s move “unsettling and unprecedented” but declined to criticize the president directly.

“While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised,” Bowser said, adding that Trump had not called her to discuss his takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department before Monday’s press conference.

She did, however, speak at length about the president’s claim that an increase in crime in D.C. necessitated his incursion into the District, citing both municipal and federal data that contradicted his claims.

“I believe that the president’s view of D.C. is shaped by his COVID-era experience during his first term,” Bowser said. “It is true that those were more challenging times. It is also true that we experience a crime spike post-COVID, but we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets and gave our police officers more tools, which is why we have seen a huge decrease in crime.”

Speaking alongside the mayor on Monday, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, Pamela A. Smith, said the District’s nearly 3,400 law enforcement officers would “work in coordination” with the federal government to enhance the city’s crime prevention resources.

“This will be an opportunity for us to come together and collaborate on being able to go out and execute warrants,” Smith said. She is set to meet with federal liaisons Monday afternoon in order to “create an operational plan for our city that will continue to keep our city safe.”

In a speech from the White House press briefing room this morning alongside several Cabinet members, Trump declared he would be placing Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and deploying at least 800 National Guard service members to the city in an effort to combat crime.

“[D.C.] has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at one point.

City officials have pointed out that violent crime dropped last year after a spike that peaked in 2023. It was at its lowest levels in more than 30 years, according to data released by the Department of Justice in January.

Bowser said that in every meeting she has had with the president this year, most of them coming shortly after he was elected, the positive strides on crime rates were discussed.

A White House official told NOTUS the federal takeover is expected to last 30 days but it “is subject to change.” Per the Home Rule Act, the president can only federalize the District’s police for 48 hours before congressional approval is required to extend that to a maximum of 30 days.

Bowser, for her part, did not outline a plan to challenge the administration’s authority and said that Trump was allowed to stage the temporary takeover. She did, however, push for D.C. statehood as the only antidote for a federal takeover.

“There are things that when a city is not a state, and not fully autonomous, and doesn’t have senators, that the federal government can do,” she said.

“If people are concerned about the president being able to move the National Guard into our city, the time to do that would have been when the Congress had a bill that could have given control of the D.C. National Guard to D.C,” Bowser continued.

It’s unclear what will happen if Trump tries to maintain control of the city’s police force after the 30-day period passes. A joint resolution to authorize the federalization of the D.C. police force beyond 30 days would require two-thirds of both chambers of Congress to pass, and it’s highly unlikely that Democrats would support it.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, posted on X after Trump’s declaration that the federalization announcement was an attempt “to distract from the failures of his Administration.”

The National Capital Region delegation, which is made up of U.S. representatives from Virginia and Maryland, released a statement calling Trump’s federalization of the D.C police force “a soft launch of authoritarianism.”

“The President’s announcement this morning is an unserious and unacceptable publicity stunt,” the statement reads. “If he wants to reduce crime in the District of Columbia, he should focus on getting his Republican allies in Congress to restore the funding they arbitrarily stripped out of the city’s budget, which risks cuts to law enforcement and other public safety measures.”