Governing by Police

When President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital in August 2025, temporarily transferring control of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to the U.S. attorney general, many commentators declared the move to be an unprecedented federalization of local police power in Washington, DC. In a strictly legal sense, this is true. With the first-known invocation of Section 740 of the 1973 Home Rule Act, Trump was able to enlist the MPD for up to 30 days to assist federal agencies with enforcing immigration law, clearing homeless encampments, and expanding law enforcement presence across the District. And though the 30-day emergency period ended in September, the president has already made clear that the DC takeover will serve as a model for nationwide attacks against immigrants, the unhoused, and other criminalized populations. But while the legal tactics of Trump’s DC takeover may be new, the temporary federalization of the MPD actually represents a return to the department’s historical role as the first institution of modern DC government. Whether or not Trump and Congress take further action to overrule home rule and the District government, local policing will remain the foundational axis on which DC is governed as the nation’s capital. 

For the first 70 years of the U.S. capital district, there was no such thing as a single DC government. After the creation of the District of Columbia in 1790, Congress largely abdicated local governance to the pre-existing cities of Georgetown, Maryland; Alexandria, Virginia; and the congressionally chartered Washington City, resulting in a patchwork police arrangement. As the work of the federal government dramatically increased to address national questions of colonial expansion, war, and slavery, policing DC became an essential, and quite personal, prerequisite task for leaders on Capitol Hill. On the eve of the Civil War in 1858, the 35th Congress debated the creation of a new local police department in response to what they deemed “a city in a lawless condition” with “the most lawless population in our midst.” Top of mind in these debates was the personal safety of elected officials on the streets of Washington. National governance, for these men, depended on the capital being policed on behalf of those in power. When President Trump declared that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia” after the attempted carjacking of a DOGE staffer in August, he echoed the guiding principle of DC policing uttered by Missouri Senator James S. Green back in 1858: “We must protect ourselves.” 

While the polarized Congress of the antebellum years was unable to agree on the specifics of a local police force, those remaining in the chamber after the war’s outbreak did manage to get the deed done. With the 1861 “Act to create a Metropolitan Police District of the District of Columbia, and to establish a Police therefor,” the wartime Congress not only created a new police department, but also inaugurated District governance. In the process of establishing the MPD, Congress had to first invent a DC jurisdiction where none previously existed. By consolidating the territories of Georgetown, Washington City, and the rest of Washington County into the “Metropolitan Police District” for the MPD to patrol, Congress had created the first institution of DC government a decade before the 1871 DC Organic Act established a unified local government in the nation’s capital. 

With no local government to oversee the MPD, Congress initially invested authority in a Board of Police Commissioners. Appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the Police Board submitted annual reports and budget requests directly to Congress, first through the secretary of the Interior and later, after the establishment of the Department of Justice in 1870, through the attorney general. When Trump transferred control of the MPD to Attorney General Pam Bondi, it was not the first time that the nation’s top law enforcement officer had exercised oversight of the DC police. Thus the MPD began its career as a federal police force.

It was not inevitable that the creation of this federally controlled DC police force would lead to the invention of a District government. In fact, the department’s earliest initiatives of arresting inebriated soldiers and fugitive slaves resulted in what the local press called a “conflict of authority” with the Union Army, which demanded sole authority over the labors of soldiers and fugitive slaves. To legitimize local policing in service of the Union government, the MPD turned its attention to sex workers who lived and work in the alley communities of downtown Washington. While inhabited alleys existed across DC in the antebellum era, these emerging Black neighborhoods were developing their own practices of community safety through informal networks of mutual aid and community defense against the dominant order of white supremacy and racial capitalism. During the course of the Civil War, arrests of “prostitutes,” as the police reports named them, quadrupled from 818 in 1862 to 2,735 by 1865, making sex workers and their alley communities, respectively, the single most criminalized occupation and geography in DC. By policing sex work during the Civil War, the MPD was able to manage the sexual behaviors of Union soldiers while also exerting control over fugitive slaves who found refuge in these alley neighborhoods. As the Police Board argued in its 1863 annual report, “the services of the police” had become “equally valuable, nay, in every respect, as indispensable to the government” of the United States as the victories of the Union Army on the battlefield.

At the same time, the MPD expanded its wartime project of policing sex work into a District-wide system of sexual policing to manage a post-slavery social order in DC. Under the pretense of policing sex work, the MPD criminalized families as “disorderly households”; used vagrancy laws to commit those without formal employment — including unemployed men, sex workers, and children — to labor in workhouses; and raided bars, dancehalls, and public gatherings to enforce acceptable racial, gendered, and sexual behaviors. 

As the Civil War turned toward Union victory, Radical Republicans in Congress began looking toward DC as a different sort of “laboratory” for a post-slavery United States. To create an “example for all the land,” in the words of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, Congress used the District to test the first federal laws on emancipation, manhood suffrage, civil rights, and universal public education. While it may be tempting to view these parallel developments of MPD policing and progressive Reconstruction policies as at odds with each other, the everyday violence of local policing proved to be a core component in the production of a racial, gendered, sexual, and class-based social order upon which Congress could conduct its experiments in post-emancipation democracy. 

While enforcing a post-emancipation social order on the streets and alleys of DC, the MPD also functioned as critical infrastructure for the emerging District government. For example, when Congress experimented in DC with manhood suffrage and universal public education in 1867, it was the MPD that supervised the first integrated elections and compiled a post-war District census to ensure equal apportioning of segregated school funds. In congratulating the police department for its expanding duties during Reconstruction, the Police Board praised “the wisdom of Congress” in creating a District-wide institution “free from all political bias.” MPD police chiefs and the Police Board also lobbied Congress to expand carceral governance across the District by 1871, successfully securing a reform school, police court, and new jail, all financed and operated on the federalized model of the MPD. And in 1874, with the tides of Reconstruction shifting toward a white supremacist backlash, Congress generalized the governing structure of MPD’s Police Board with a federally appointed Board of District Commissioners that would rule the District for the next century. 

Far from a historical anomaly, then, President Trump’s federalization of the MPD under the Home Rule Act not only signals a desire to return the department to its original form, but also renews the time-honored function of repressive local policing in DC as the foundation of governing the capital. During the Progressive Era, MPD alley wars literally paved the way for the remaking of downtown Washington into a symbol of American imperial strength. When the District finally achieved its current home rule system in 1973, DC self-governance was accompanied by a carceral crackdown that would serve as a testing ground for the policies of mass incarceration. And in the latest chapter, Trump’s attacks on local immigrant communities and homeless encampments have been made possible through the cooperation of the MPD, even after the putative end of the takeover.

At the same time, the story of local policing in DC is incomplete if it doesn’t account for the traditions of local resistance that have sustained life “beyond the monuments,” as the popular DC saying goes. Just as those insurgent alley communities of the Civil War era built vibrant communities that resisted police control for generations, so too have we seen effective mutual aid and community defense networks emerge in the face of Trump’s recent mobilizations in DC. From spontaneous crowds redirecting traffic away from joint MPD-ICE checkpoints and neighbors organizing informal copwatch chats to informal groups distributing supplies for unhoused neighbors under threat of impending sweeps, the emergency responses from local residents are part of a larger history, stretching all the way back to the earliest days of the MPD.

As President Trump threatens to expand his experiment in DC across the country, targeting other cities run by Democrats, the unique status of the District may appear to be an outlier. Certainly, the specific legal avenue used by the Trump administration in DC will not apply to states and municipalities with full representation in Congress and control over their local budgets and police forces. But if there is one clear lesson from the history of policing and community resistance in the making of Washington, DC, as the capital city of the United States during the Civil War era, it is that DC policing often makes the politics of Washington possible.