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 “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 D.C. 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 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. 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).”
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.
