When President Donald Trump announced a takeover of the nation’s capital in August, he justified the move by claiming that crime in Washington, D.C., was rampant. It wasn’t.
Many videos have surfaced on social media depicting law enforcement officers from multiple agencies targeting predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods while outraged bystanders berate the officers.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been the primary spokesperson for the takeover, has been posting the number of arrests made since the announcement to her X account, now totaling close to 2,000. “93 more arrests and 6 illegal firearms off the streets of our nation’s capital,” Bondi wrote on X in August. “Sending my heartfelt prayers and support to all law enforcement officers working to make DC safe again. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Matthew 5:9”.
To furnish the administration’s “peace-making efforts,” some National Guard units have begun carrying firearms, according to The Associated Press.
It is tempting to regard this spectacle as novel, to see it as the dark side of American exceptionalism, or to interpret the presence of masked agents of the state as the ghoulish approach of fascism. But I grew up in D.C., and overpolicing is not new.
I can attest to the bedlam of sirens that accompanies the presidential and vice presidential Secret Service detail. I have witnessed local police harassing young teenagers in fast food restaurants because of the locally enforced Juvenile Curfew Act. I have encountered Secret Service, Capitol Police, Metropolitan Police, Metro Transit Police, and State Park Police. I was in D.C. on Jan. 6 and 7 when the National Guard set up checkpoints in front of Union Station in the dead of winter.
Despite the videos posted by Bondi or local bystanders, the endless reel of arrests on social media fails to capture the realities just outside the frame. In October 2024, before Trump took over D.C. and accused houseless people of turning the “capital into a wasteland,” local D.C. officials were already sweeping homeless encampments throughout the city. Black and brown residents have been rounded up and harassed long before Trump’s performative executive order.
In other words, Trump’s violent crackdown on marginalized communities and Bondi’s theological justification for it are not an aberration of American national policy; they are the distillation of it.
In Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas’ Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, the theologian traces the history of the “theo-ideological legitimation” of overpolicing the Black body in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder. After a jury failed to convict George Zimmerman of murdering Martin, Douglas set out to map the history, policies, practices, and logic that not only allowed Zimmerman to be acquitted but also emboldened him to shoot the unarmed, Black 17-year-old in the first place. Critical to Douglas’ project is understanding how Anglo-Saxon exceptionalist ideology and America’s sense of Manifest Destiny gave birth to stand-your-ground ethos which, Douglas argues, is more than just a law permitting deadly force for self-defense, but ultimately a culture of sanctioned violence.
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“From the Pilgrims forward, the idea of Manifest Destiny, even if the precise phrase was not used, was the driving force behind the founding, building, and expansion of the nation,” writes Douglas. “Again, it was integral to America’s Anglo-Saxon exceptionalist identity. If people believe themselves to be chosen by God because they and their way of life are superior to others, then the idea of acting as ‘their brother’s keeper’ is inevitable.”
Douglas argues that the “hypervaluation” of whiteness bred by American exceptionalism is concomitant with the judicial denigration of Blackness. This holds true both on, say, a winter night in Sanford, Fla., when Trayvon was murdered, or currently in the nation’s capital, where an estimated 2,200 National Guard troops have been deployed.
While it is cause for extreme concern that Trump is poised to use repressive tactics to undermine Democratic rule in other major U.S. cities, the underlying logic of overpolicing did not begin with Trump’s early August press conference announcing the takeover.
I returned to Douglas’ words, which seem to have no expiration date, because although Trump’s aggressive show of force is a signal for his willingness and intention to undermine local authority in Democrat-run cities, it is premised on legislative policies and an ideological formulation that many Democratic mayors have long cosigned.
Counter to Trump’s claims of rampant crime due to Democrats being “totally weak on crime,” the 25 largest Democrat-run cities spend nearly 40% more per capita on policing than the 25 largest Republican-run cities, according to a report published in 2022 by the self-described “passionate moderate” think tank Third Way.
Metropolitan Police Department statistics indicate that violent crime in the nation’s capital has fallen 27% since the beginning of the year compared to the same period in 2024. But it is the image of a blood-smeared white teenager in white pants slumped on the ground that emboldened the president to manufacture a military occupation of a major U.S. city.
Even though I moved away from D.C. seven years ago, the sight of masked agents on familiar streets makes me grind my teeth. My inner voice has grown hoarse at hurling epithets at imaginary officers. No doubt the proliferation of footage is meant to provoke some reaction, but to what end? In one video, a bystander screams obscenities at masked agents after they shove a civilian to the ground.
When Bondi quotes scripture suggesting that these officers are peacemakers, it becomes essential to ask: Peace for whom? This nation has always privileged the peace of white property and perspective over Black and brown humanity.
When Bondi quotes scripture suggesting that these officers are peacemakers, it becomes essential to ask: Peace for whom? This nation has always privileged the peace of white property and perspective over Black and brown humanity.
August 28 marked the 70-year anniversary of Emmet Till’s lynching when two white men, under the guise of peacekeeping, murdered 14-year-old Till after he allegedly whistled at one of their wives. Three decades later, Roy Bryant, one of the murderers, said in an interview with a local Mississippi paper, “If Emmett Till hadn’t got out of line, it probably wouldn’t have happened to him.”
In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, liberation theologian James H. Cone observed that the remarkable thing about the Till lynching “was not so much the callousness of the deed as the militant response it evoked. If lynching was intended to instill silence and passivity, this event had the opposite effect, inspiring blacks to rise in defiance, to cast off centuries of paralyzing fear.”
In 2018, a few days after July 4, I stood in front of the White House with hundreds of D.C. residents to counter-protest a Proud Boys demonstration. I’ll never forget hearing what one D.C. native said, “I’ve lived here my entire life and I’ve never been to the White House until today.” Well, President Trump, we’re here now.
The occupation of D.C. forces us to confront once more the death-dealing culture of policing in this country. While the spectacle of violence on Black and brown bodies continues to pervade our screens, we look to a theology and practice formed just outside of the camera’s frame in our streets, homes, and prisons. We look to the experiences and realities of Black D.C. natives who have long been organizing and praying for an end to white supremacist policing. We look to the kind of theology that Douglas mustered for her congregation the day after the Martin verdict was decided: “Even though I am broken-hearted my faith is unshattered. Let our faith not be shattered. Let us be strong, thoughtful, aware, true, and engaged. Let us be a witness to what it means to be a people of faith in a broken world.”
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