The District of Columbia lacks statehood and remains legally ambiguous, underrepresented, and officially disempowered by federal authority. The federal government has neglected Washington's needs and potential, creating conditions exploited by recent deployments of heavily armed soldiers and masked federal agents. The presidential justification framed the deployments as a response to crime, but crime data do not show a crisis. Critics label the actions authoritarian and liken them to police-state tactics. Federal administrations and Republican congresses have a long history of undermining DC self-governance. Frederick Douglass worked on voting rights, arguing that power concedes nothing without a sustained demand for democratic inclusion.
Trump acknowledges that his move to militarize law enforcement in DC has unsettled Americans. "Already they're saying, 'He's a dictator,'" Trump said last week, after the military surge began. The president claimed that he was just trying to fight an out-of-control crime wave. "The place is going to hell and we've got to stop it," he announced. "So instead of saying 'He's a dictator,' they should say, 'We're going to join him and make Washington safe.'"
But Trump's crime claim is wrong. "There is not a crime crisis in DC," Rosa Brooks, a former DC Metropolitan reserve police officer who now teaches at Georgetown Law School, told NPR. Brooks decried the president's authoritarian overreach, saying, "This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory." Frederick Douglass recognized that there was a crisis of democracy in the nation's capital 135 years ago.
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