President Donald Trump on Monday invoked a never-before-used authority to seize control of the Washington, D.C. police department and hand it over to the control of his attorney general as he simultaneously ordered the National Guard to begin patrolling the streets.
Casting the unprecedented move as needed to “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump announced his federalization of the nation’s capital from the White House press briefing room just months after the Justice Department issued a press release touting the city’s declining crime rate.
