On D.C. Streets, Feds Make a Show of Force
WASHINGTON—Ebony Payne often has to spend much of her evening sorting through messages from her Kingman Park neighbors in the northeast part of the city reporting assaults, smashed car windows, break-ins, shootings and teenagers threatening children or even dogs.
The 34-year-old neighborhood commissioner said she and her community are frustrated by the city’s inability to respond to “out of control” crime. When they heard President Trump was federalizing District of Columbia police and sending in hundreds of National Guard troops, some residents’ first reaction was relief, she said.
“We all wanted something to be done,” said Payne. “It’s just really unfortunate that we are in this situation where there’s a sledgehammer on our city, because we couldn’t get a handle on our crime problem.”. Yet so far, Trump’s security surge hasn’t materialized in Kingman Park. “I was really expecting to see more,” she said, noting the D.C. armory where the National Guard is stationed is only minutes away. Payne’s experience underscores the disconnect felt across parts of the city since Trump announced the security surge on Aug. 11, framing the federal takeover as a campaign to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”
Hundreds of federal agents—from drug- and gun-enforcement teams to immigration officers—set up traffic checkpoints, arrested delivery drivers and restaurant workers over immigration violations, and carried out street patrols. But the most visible show of force has centered on the city’s downtown, upscale corridors and tourist hubs.
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By mid-Friday, the surge of officers appeared scant in areas that had among the highest concentrations of crime in the last month, data show.
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