James' World 2

Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., was born just a year before the city’s residents were given the right to elect their mayor. In the five decades since, Washington has wrestled with challenges common to many U.S. cities, like violent crime. It has also faced challenges that, given its peculiar status under federal law, it shares with no other American city.

But even in Washington’s unique history, there was no episode quite like the one that Ms. Bowser, in her third term as mayor, had to confront on Monday afternoon.

“We know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” the mayor said to reporters just hours after the city’s most prominent resident, President Trump, announced that the federal government was going to take over the local police department and deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington. “While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented,” the mayor said, “I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised.”

Indeed, Mr. Trump has not been shy about his feelings toward the nation’s capital, calling it a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment” and “a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.”

Key roles in the city’s criminal justice system are in federal hands, with the president nominating judges and the U.S. attorney, who serves as the city’s chief prosecutor in most criminal cases. Laws passed by the District of Columbia Council are subject to congressional approval, and budgets are at the mercy of congressional whim. Elsewhere, a state’s governor typically deploys the National Guard. In Washington, however, forces can be deployed on city streets without the local government’s say-so.

And with the declaration of an emergency, a president can come in and, temporarily at least, take over the local police.

Until Monday morning, no president had.

“He’s doing this because he can,” said Charles Allen, a member of the Council who represents the Capitol Hill neighborhood. “He has the ability to place the military on our streets. He has the ability to take over our police.”

In many American cities, the rate of violent crime rose sharply during the coronavirus pandemic and fell in the years afterward, now returning to pre-Covid levels. Washington’s crime spike lasted longer than that of many cities, but over the past 18 months, violent crime there has fallen considerably. The murder rate has declined to 2019 levels, and in January, before Mr. Trump took office, the U.S. Justice Department announced that violent crime had fallen to a 30-year low.

This was not the city that the president described on Monday, one of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” that was in need of “liberation.”

In her comments on Monday afternoon, Ms. Bowser said that though she believed the president had a mistaken view of the crime situation, she was still committed to bringing down crime in her city.