President Trump’s decision to take control of the Washington, DC Metropolitan police force is an extraordinary but necessary action. The city is suffering under weak-on-crime policies from the mayor and city council, excessive dysfunction in the police, and parents who fail to prevent their children from becoming juvenile delinquents — and then face no consequences for doing so.

By today announcing that he will send in the National Guard to support policing operations, however, Trump is making a mistake. Soldiers should not be deployed on policing operations unless absolutely necessary. And while the arrival of more federal law enforcement officers such as FBI agents is welcome, their primary line of effort should be to supplement longer-term investigations of DC criminal gangs which often engage in territorial gun battles. Still, to truly fix the city’s crime problem, more complicated reforms are needed.

DC crime is falling, but remains far too high measured against pre-pandemic and total population metrics. Police leaders also engage in statistical manipulation, downgrading offences in order to claim reductions in serious crime. The FBI should be investigating these police offences under federal public misconduct laws. Juvenile criminality is also rife, with offending teenagers not held sufficiently accountable. Parents of habitual juvenile offenders should also face prosecutions and relief of government benefits for child neglect.

Leading culprits for DC’s laissez-faire approach to criminality can be found on the city council. Facing rising public concern over their efforts to defund the police and reduce penalties for serious offences, they resort to the pathetic deflection that their detractors are engaged in “misinformation”. Indeed, one member, Brianne Nadeau, is renowned for her unwillingness even to bother responding to the crime-related concerns of her constituents. The DC Council’s soft-on-crime agenda is perhaps best reflected by its longstanding restrictions on police pursuits. This has led to criminals happily ignoring police sirens in confidence that no comprehensive pursuit will be forthcoming. Serious offenders have thus evaded detention and police morale has plummeted.

Advancing that point, while DC police officers are generally professional, they suffer from low morale in the face of a city council and prosecutor’s office which puts criminals first. Declining morale has generated too many incidents, testified to by many city residents, in which police responses to active criminality are extraordinarily slow.

Two gunmen once hid in my backyard just after a shooting, apparently unconcerned with invading a homeowner’s property. Six years ago, in another incident, I sought to offer aid to a 19-year-old who was shot on my street. At the scene, I couldn’t get through to the 911 call centre — a regular occurrence for a centre that is defined by gross incompetence and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s nepotism — but police officers nearby fortunately heard the shots. Unfortunately, the young man died in hospital. Although surveillance footage proves the killer took time to fire a second volley of shots at his victim, he received just five years in prison. He was then released early, broke the terms of his probation, and received only six months’ additional prison time.

This sentence reflects a tendency by the DC US Attorney’s Office to regularly reduce charges in order to secure plea deals. Successive officeholders have instead focused on politically charged prosecutions. Former US Attorney for DC Matthew Graves prioritised prosecutions for involvement in the events of January 6 2021 over nuts-and-bolts law enforcement. And Trump’s short-lived US Attorney Ed Martin fired numerous prosecutors, further worsening the case backlog, and took controversial partisan stances such as insisting that the 2020 election was stolen.

As DC suffers from this mounting dysfunction, Trump is right to push for action on crime. But fixing the problem will require patient, persistent action. The city council must be corralled to pass laws that allow DC police to do their jobs, prosecutors and police leaders must be held accountable, and young criminals must find themselves behind bars. Without these steps, today’s announcement is just theatre.

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Tom Rogan is a national security writer at the Washington Examiner

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