"Crime" And The Occupation of D.C.

Edited by Sam Thielman

FOLLOWING SULLA'S SEIZURE of power in Rome circa 83 B.C., the thuggish young man who would become Pompey Magnus was dispatched to Sicily to bring discontented notables to heel. Plutarch records that Pompey encountered resistance in Messana. The great and good of the city "declined [Pompey's] tribunal and jurisdiction on the plea that they were forbidden by an ancient law of the Romans." Pompey's response echoes throughout the history of civilizational fratricide: "Quit quoting laws to those of us with swords." 

I kept thinking of Pompey the more I read over the past week about President Trump predicating his takeover and military occupation of Washington D.C. on the question of crime in the city. I heard Pompey sneering when liberals objected that, nuh-uh, crime in the city is down, actually. Those liberals are simultaneously correct and missing the point. 

The point of seizing local policing powers in Washington; augmenting them with the truly dizzying variety of federal policing agencies in the District; supplementing them with the D.C. National Guard; and now adding deployments of Guard forces from Republican governors in three states is to criminalize undesirable populations. The petty Pompeys of 2025 are to experiment with bringing "sanctuary" cities—cities that exploit immigrants but don't actively hunt them—to heel. Los Angeles was first. D.C. is now. New York will be next. 

Credulous news reports and social media posts object that while Trump may be overreacting, and while statistics may show crime in the city declining, at least Trump is finally taking the plight of the good, besieged folk of Washington seriously. A more thorough understanding of what Trump is doing, though cloaked in euphemism, comes from the far-right Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule. Vermeule hailed Trump's actions in the guise of dispassionately analyzing a disconnect between Trump’s supporters and his opposition: "[S]ome people are talking about crime in the strict legal sense, and some are talking about pervasive social disorder which does not necessarily result in any 'crime' in the strict legal sense."

Quit quoting "'crime' in the strict legal sense" to those who want to bring the sword to "pervasive social disorder." Vermeule, a law professor, knows that when you disregard "crime in the strict legal sense" as the criterion for enforcement, grand new vistas of violence against "disordered" social populations open. 

And while I'm not on the ground in Washington, that looks a whole lot, from the available reporting, like what's unfolding. Masked men with guns are grabbing "anyone who appeared Hispanic," The Guardian reported, paraphrasing Home Depot employee Juwan Brooks, who observed a raid on parking-lot day laborers. At the Pentagon, spokesperson Kingsley Wilson announced that the D.C. Guard would be assisting police with, among other tasks, "area beautification." That's a euphemism for homeless sweeps, which is the other component of the occupation, now backstopped by soldiers "armed consistent with their mission and training." 

For while crime may have declined, poverty—visible poverty, with all of its suffering—remains, as it is the necessary product of the economic system upheld by both Trump and his Democratic critics. For the wealthier citizens of Washington—those who hasten to add that while they oppose what Trump is doing, crime is a problem—being proximate to visible manifestations of poverty feels like crime. I lived through the Rudy Giuliani Era of New York gentrification 30 years ago, and the past week in Washington is Giuliani’s dream come true.

But as Wilson's press briefing indicated, there's an added turn of the historical ratchet. Several people made sure I saw the Newsmax comments of Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee. "Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades walking the streets trying to reduce crime. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that's what the president is doing." I hate to say I told you so. 

Now, the U.S. military was not “in many countries around the world for the past two decades … trying to reduce crime,” although it sure committed crimes in many of them. (I haven't read Seth Harp's The Fort Bragg Cartel yet but don't miss his excellent TrueAnon episode.) But Comer isn't talking about crime in the strict legal sense. Comer is talking about what the U.S. declared to be pervasive social disorder in those countries, which it then policed imperially. It might have ended in agony overseas, where they've learned not to quote laws to men with swords, but here in "the big cities in America now," Comer expects to meet less resistance. That is, he expects the respectable sort of resistance, the one that quotes statistics to those with service weapons and eventually ceases its quotations as it realizes that the wielders of those weapons only use them on less-respectable people, the sort who commit pervasive social disorder.

Comer may have grounds for such belief. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has decided on a strategy of collaboration. Late last week, Trump pushed any D.C. mayor to an intolerable point by attempting to invest the Drug Enforcement Agency head with the powers of the Metro Police chief. Bowser won on that, but she had already sold out the city’s most vulnerable, for now MPD (what they call the police in D.C.) will cooperate with ICE. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported: 

With Trump focused on crime in the nation’s capital, officials in the D.C. government had hoped to try to outlast the White House’s interest in the city and position Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) as central to Trump’s wins, according to two people familiar with internal deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. That approach involved agreeing to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

[MPD Chief Pamela] Smith’s order Thursday said D.C. police officers could assist federal immigration enforcement efforts by sharing information about people not in custody, such as those encountered at traffic stops. It also said officers could assist by transporting federal immigration agency employees and their detained suspects.

The people of D.C., like the rest of us, will have to rely on one another for the protection their local elected officials will not provide, busy as they are quoting laws to men with swords drawn to cut down pervasive social disorder. "We're gonna support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington D.C.," Comer promised. After all, he said, "We spend a lot on our military." What are we going to do, not use it on undesirable domestic populations? 

SPEAKING OF CRIME, Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, a senior official with the Israeli National Cyber Directorate, was arrested in Las Vegas as part of "a large-scale operation targeting suspects in the online sexual exploitation of minors." While Alexandrovich reportedly faces felony charges, he was released on $10,000 bail and… allowed to return to Israel. 

Oh, and so soon after Israel murdered the journalist Anas al-Sharif, we learn from Yuval Abraham that the IDF created a "Legitimization Cell" after October 7 to portray Palestinian journalists as Hamas for the purposes of killing them. "If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” one of Abraham's intelligence sources explained.

JASPER NATHANIEL reports that since February, the Israelis have held a 16-year old Palestinian-American boy, Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim, in Megiddo prison. Read Jasper's interview with Mohammed's father Zaher.

SECRETARY OF STATE Marco Rubio recently suggested in an interview that he might add the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a much-demonized Muslim civil rights group, as terrorist organizations. I don't know more than that, but doing so would be a milestone in the U.S. criminalization of Islam. CAIR is demanding Rubio clarify his remarks.