When President Donald Trump first declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital and sent hundreds of federal law enforcement agents to patrol its streets, this district resident had a hard time taking it too seriously.
The initial images of bored Drug Enforcement Administration agents strolling past perplexed joggers on the National Mall were more clownish than carceral. Local street resistance to the occupation was limited to a drunk guy throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
But inevitably, as this operation has dragged on, things have taken a darker turn. The sandwich-thrower was overcharged and rearrested in a needless, publicized show of force.
Masked federal agents have set up an unconstitutional checkpoint, violently arrested at least one delivery driver, and filmed themselves tearing down a banner protesting their presence in the city. Each day, more and more National Guard members pour into the capital.
The conversation about Trump’s declared crime emergency has understandably, albeit unhelpfully, provoked a lot of discourse about how safe D.C. is, whether a federalized local police department will make it safer, whether federal agents are being deployed in the right places and going after the right crimes, and on and on.
This incessant crime conversation has distracted from just how un-American Trump’s show of force in the nation’s capital is.
Uniformed troops and masked federal agents doing routine law enforcement at the command of the president is just not how we do things in the United States.
The entire point of the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the federal government from becoming a despotism, and one of the primary ways it does this is by limiting how many men with guns it has at its disposal.
This is why the Constitution places strict constraints on maintaining a standing army. It’s why there are only three crimes mentioned in the Constitution, none of which would plausibly require federal agents to patrol U Street. It’s why questions of what to criminalize and who to prosecute were largely left up to the states.
The Third Amendment is mostly treated as an anachronistic joke today. In fact, it is a load-bearing part of the Constitution that makes clear that the military and the police are different things and that Americans should not have to tolerate the presence of armed agents of the states as a routine part of daily life.
Obviously we’ve deviated considerably from this ideal since the founding generation. The federal criminal code is now extensive. The feds’ wars on drugs, terror, and immigration have grown the number of militarized federal agents doing law enforcement activities.
Federal money has subsidized a similar trend of militarization of state and local police forces.
Reason has been decrying this trend for decades.
In his book Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko writes about how the trend of increased police militarization has eroded the “Symbolic Third Amendment” and the free society it protects.
It’s darkly ironic then that, after decades of politicians of both parties in D.C. gifting the federal government vast powers to police the rest of the country, a militarized federal police force is now being deployed on the streets of America’s capital against its residents.
This is why arguments about whether federal agents could be more effectively deployed in less visible, higher crime areas of the city are completely beside the point. The federal government acting as a beat cop is inimical to our constitutional design, regardless of how effective its efforts are.
That D.C. is a federal district might seem to complicate this point. In fact, it reinforces it.
Despite being a constitutionally peculiar special district, a lot of effort has been put into giving D.C. a local police force that does not practically function as an arm of the federal government.
Even in the seat of federal power, it’s understood that a force of federal agents policing everyday life is not something ordinary citizens should have to put up with.
That Trump has the power to federalize the D.C. police or deploy the D.C. National Guard doesn’t stop his actions from being authoritarian and offensive to the spirit of the Constitution, even if it doesn’t violate the letter of it.
It’s also cold comfort that Trump’s declared crime emergency is clearly mostly a performative act to rile up the libs and not a serious effort at combating crime.
While the president is staging the performance, it’s disconcerting that he’s opted to cast himself as the villain in the play.
Moreover, the longer federal agents are deployed on D.C. streets, the greater the odds that more serious abuses do happen.
It’s true that D.C. today is not as locked down as it has been in recent years. The police-enforced curfews during the George Floyd protests or the security cordons that sprang up after the January 6 riots were a lot more visible and heavy-handed.
Excessive as those police actions were (particularly the latter), they were at least being done as an emergency response to widespread breakdowns in public order.
Trump is rolling out the feds in D.C. to do routine law enforcement. That’s un-American.
