Section 740 (a) of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 allows the president of the United States to take over the Washington, D.C., police department for up to 30 days assuming he or she notifies certain heads of congressional committees. The intent of that section, at least as we read it, was to provide needed support from that department to the federal government in the event of a major national emergency of some kind, and it surely is debatable whether everyday law and order in the district falls under that criterion.
Nonetheless, President Donald Trump did indeed act under that law and declared the requisite national emergency,
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claiming that the crime rate negatively affected “the Federal Government’s ability to operate efficiently to address the Nation’s broader interests without fear of our workers being subjected to rampant violence.” He delegated his authority over the D.C. police force to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, a busy woman. And so, yes, Mayor Muriel Bowser was right to say she would cooperate.In so doing, unsurprisingly, Trump then riffed on Chicago.
That’s never something we enjoy. He trashed and insulted our duly elected officials, depicted our town and state as a dystopian hellhole and suggested that he is looking for ways to stick the federal nose into our law-and-order situation, too.
So. First things first. Trump’s insults, which Gov. JB Pritzker likes then to match in kind, inadvisably in our view, insult the citizens of America’s third largest city and affect its appeal to new businesses, new residents, international visitors and thus its overall economic development.
Trump should cease and desist trashing America’s great cities. The mouth of the man is a talking emergency for Chicago. We’ve got our own problems to address without having to defend ourselves simultaneously from our own president.
And so we remind the president, apparently a wannabe mayor, that there is no Section 740 (a) that could be applied to Chicago, Illinois, and therefore he does not have the authority to bring in federal forces of any kind to take over law and order on our streets and he should make no such attempt.
This editorial board has great confidence in the Chicago Police Department and its capable chief, Larry Snelling, and such presidential pronouncements only make their difficult job harder.
Trump must know that the police force has been subject to numerous attacks over the last few years and that detailed, effective and trusted policing has a significant impact on any city’s crime rate. He should be boosting the men and women in uniform who work the streets of this city and heralding their achievements, not threatening them with some kind of unctuous hostile takeover. We think that even right-of-center Chicagoans who find the crime rate here unacceptable and blame local officials to some extent wouldn’t want to see federal agents or troops trying to police street crime.
For the good of all, Trump ought to back off and tend to the expansive business that is his responsibility under the Constitution. Big-city policing isn’t part of the president’s job description.
Democrats generally have responded to the latest Trump-induced breaches of normalcy by pointing out that crime is down in Washington, D.C., and in Chicago for that matter. Although justifiable by the data, this is not a winning political strategy in our view, not least because crime rates are just one more statistic that has become contested and that the nature of violent crime, in particular, is that when it impacts you or even someone you know, then the stats retreat into the rearview mirror.
The most effective Trump counter from elected officials is crime-fighting specifics. From the rest of us, what matters most is support for all of those, in and out of uniform, who are working hard on the problem.
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