BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE – President Donald Trump’s decision to seize control of Washington, D.C.’s police force and deploy National Guard troops is not about fighting crime—it’s about weaponizing fear, distorting facts, and sending a racist dog whistle aimed squarely at a majority-Black city and its Black woman mayor.
On Monday, Trump declared “liberation day in D.C.,” vowing to “wipe out crime, savagery, filth, and scum” in the capital. The language was as inflammatory as it was disconnected from reality. His data shows that in 2024, violent crime in D.C. fell by 35% compared to the previous year, reaching a 30-year low. Homicides dropped 32%, robberies 39%, armed carjackings 53%, and assaults with a dangerous weapon 27%. Even now, D.C. police report violent crime, which is down another 26% from last year.
Yet Trump’s narrative paints the city as spiraling into chaos—a deliberate fiction that gives him cover to impose federal authority where it’s neither requested nor warranted. And D.C. isn’t the only target. He name-checked Baltimore, New York, and Chicago—all cities with large Black populations, Black political leadership or both. This is a calculated pattern: vilify Black-led cities, strip away their autonomy, and use them as backdrops for a law-and-order spectacle.
In June, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) announced that it continued to see a 22% decrease in homicides and a 19% decrease in non-fatal shootings. Group A National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) offenses are down 11%, with many categories down by double digits. Additionally, the clearance rates for homicides and citywide investigations, including non-fatal shootings, robberies, burglaries, and more, are significantly above the national average.
Also, from Jan. 2025 through May 2025, New York City experienced and set the record for the lowest number of shootings and murders in May. Further contradicting Trump, shootings and homicides are each down more than 30% through the first half of 2025 compared to the same time last year, after the city recorded its fewest homicides for any June in more than a decade.
According to data from the city and the Chicago Police Department, total violent crime is down at least 22% thus far in 2025, while there have been 90 fewer homicides and more than 400 fewer shootings compared to last year.
Still, Trump’s news conference was a spectacle laced with hypocrisy. He railed against “no bail” policies, yet after being convicted of 34 felony counts, he posted bail and ran for—and won—the presidency again. He was also impeached twice during his first term.
Recently, his administration has dispatched at least 450 federal officers into D.C., with plans for a military presence, even though Mayor Muriel Bowser has not requested it. As she put it on MSNBC: “If the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here, but it won’t be because there’s a spike in crime.”
Trump’s “cleanup” pledge goes beyond policing. He’s vowed to remove homeless residents forcibly from D.C., promising to relocate them “far from the Capital.” His language criminalizes poverty and mirrors the racialized rhetoric he’s used in other contexts—most recently in California, where he’s asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow immigration arrests based on race, language and type of work.
For D.C., nearly half of whose residents are Black, this takeover isn’t about safety. It’s about control. It’s about a president using manipulated crime narratives and militarized force to undermine local Black leadership—and setting a precedent that any majority-Black city could be next.
“If the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here, but it won’t be because there’s a spike in crime,” Bowser told reporters.
