Recent federal intervention in Washington, D.C.’s policing continues a pattern of treating “public safety” as racially charged justification for militarization. On Monday August 11th, the current administration activated section 740 of the D.C. Home Act rule to enforce deliberate control of the Metropolitan Police Department and employ new Drug Enforcement Administration Director Terry Cole as “emergency police commissioner,” supported by National Guard troops.
While framed as a response to crime, the move echoes a long history of using law enforcement to suppress and destabilize Black communities. D.C. became the first majority-Black city in 1957, peaking at 71% in 1970. The city has developed an affluent Black professional class that challenges longstanding racial hierarchies. D.C. has one of the highest concentrations of Black wealth and professionals in the nation — 13% of lawyers are Black compared to only 2% globally and 30% of doctors are Black while only 5% are globally. Instead of protecting residents, federal control undermines Black communities and progress.
Since D.C. is not a state, the federal government has unusual leverage over its security enforcement. The Congressional Research Service explains that “unlike the National Guards of the states and territories, the D.C. National Guard is not under the command of a governor. Instead, it is directly under the President of the United States, exercised through the Secretary of Defense.”
The National Guard was designed as a federal security arm embedded inside a majority-Black city, not as a community defense force. This unique legal structure explains why the militarization of D.C. looks less like a neutral security measure and more like the continuation of a system where the federal government holds the power to militarize Black space at will.
The federal government believes they should exercise this right over the assumption that DC is “crime ridden,” which is ultimately presumed based on racial bias. However, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, crime rates are down by 35% since 2023, the lowest levels in 30 years.
We’ve seen this before. In the summer of 2020, President Trump and Attorney General William Barr launched Operation Legend and sent hundreds of federal agents into cities like Portland, Chicago, and Detroit during the Black Lives Matter protests to counter the increase in “violent crimes.” The Department of Justice deployed over 290 federal officers in nine cities including unmarked officers detaining protestors, expanding surveillance of black communities, and “crowd-control” measures like tear gas and rubber bullets.
Critics of this approach have said that any collaboration between federal agents and local law enforcement should be community-based and rooted in trust. Most communities felt the militarization was counterproductive and harmful for their communities. Those same policy tactics, federal surge forces, ambiguous rules of engagement, and reliance on surveillance, are visible again in Washington, D.C., with federal leaders openly signaling that Chicago and other majority-Black hubs could be next.
The continuity of overpolicing does not affect random “crime ridden” neighborhoods, but where the root of Black wealth in the US takes place targeting the nation’s rare hubs of Black affluence and power.
Consider a suburb in Chicago called Flossmoor, where over 60% of its residents are Black and the median household income remains above $130,000. Federal officials have recently called Chicago a “killing field.” In actuality, according to FBI data, “major cities in red states had significantly higher rates of violent crime per 100,000 people, including Memphis (2,501), Kansas City (1,547), Tulsa (942), and Louisville (707).”
This is a historical pattern of dismantling thriving black neighborhoods that have had precedent set from Tulsa’s Greenwood District, once known as “Black Wall Street,” to the Black towns displaced by Lake Lanier in Georgia or by the construction of Dulles Airport in Virginia, U.S.
Unfortunately, America is not foreign to the deliberate undermining of Black prosperity, and the current posture toward cities like D.C. signals that we are, once again, letting history repeat itself. What is framed as public safety too often becomes a pretext for dismantling the very communities where Black success and stability have taken root.