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      Federal prosecutors launch inquiry into Washington DC police over allegedly fudged crime statistics

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      Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into allegations that Washington DC police systematically manipulated crime statistics to make the city appear safer than it actually is.The probe, anonymous sources tell the Washington Post, NBC News and Fox News, being conducted by the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia under Jeanine Pirro, is the latest escalation between the Trump administration and DC officials over federal control of local policing.The justice department did not respond to a request for comment on the investigation.Trump somewhat confirmed the investigation on Monday, writing on social media that DC provided “fake crime numbers” to create a “false illusion of safety” and officials were “under serious investigation”.The federal investigation reportedly started after Cmdr Michael Pulliam was suspended in May by the Metropolitan police department for allegedly altering crime data. The local NBC station reported last month that Pulliam, the former commander of Washington DC’s 3rd district that patrols the Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights neighborhoods, faced accusations from the police union of falsifying data, including misreporting stabbings and carjackings as lesser offenses. Pulliam denies the charges.But federal prosecutors are now examining potential wrongdoing by multiple police and city officials, according to law enforcement sources.DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has repeatedly cited police data showing violent crime down by 27% over the last year to argue against Trump’s federal takeover of local police. The department has separately reported that violent crime fell by 35% in 2024.The chief of DC’s police union, Gregg Pemberton – who supports federal control – calls both sets of statistics “preposterous”, and said officers know the reality on the streets.“We go call to call to call – robbery to carjacking to stabbing to shooting,” Pemberton told NBC News Washington last week. “Crime is ubiquitous in every quadrant of the city.”Pemberton claimed that Washington DC police have a directive to underreport violent crimes.“What we’ve heard through our members and through members of management that were willing to talk with the union is that this is a directive from the command staff … that they wanna make sure that these classifications of these reports are adjusted over time to make sure that the overall crime stats stay down,” he told NBC. “And this is deliberately done.” More

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      Trump’s DC crackdown will do little to prevent crime, advocates say: ‘That’s not what creates safety’

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      Donald Trump’s hyperbolic portrayal of crime in major American cities, and his deployment of the national guard in Washington DC ostensibly in an effort to combat it, have reignited a decades-old debate about crime, violence and which policies and approaches can address it.The US president has cited cities such as Oakland, Philadelphia and Chicago as examples of places overwhelmed by crime and violence. He has put forward an increased militarization of law enforcement, and more money and legal protections for police, as the most effective ways to address homicides and other violent crime.But to violence prevention workers, the recent statements appeared made not out of care and concern for the lower-income Black and Latino victims who bear an outsized share of the nation’s crimes, but to undermine and dismiss the progress community groups have made.And, the advocates argue, the administration’s emphasis on law enforcement and prosecution as the sole ways to stop crime will do little to stop the cycles of violence and property crime that these groups have faced through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.“The police are about response. But that’s not what creates safety,” said Aqeela Sherrills, a longtime community violence intervention leader in Los Angeles. “A lot of our urban communities have been war zones because they lack investment in infrastructure and programming. It’s really disheartening to hear the president of the United States put out misinformation.”Sherrills began his career in violence prevention in Watts in the early 90s. Since then he’s been a leading force in several organisations that work intensely with the small portion of a city’s population responsible for the most violence in an effort to prevent crime and support victims of crime. Throughout his tenure, he said, he had seen the biggest successes in violence reduction come through training local non-profits, community leaders and officials on different violence community prevention models and then allowing them to build bespoke strategies from there.Over the decades, various models have seen major successes. Some deploy violence prevention workers to middle and high schools. In other programs, they use probation officers as a conduit to connect with young adults who are carrying and using firearms illegally. Some programs send workers to hospitals after a shooting, in an effort to prevent retaliatory violence. Some models rely on a police-community partnership, others don’t involve police at all.But most programs center on connecting with mostly young men and teenage boys whose conflicts spill out on to city streets, traumatizing entire neighborhoods.This method has shown promise, research shows, In 2024 the Brooklyn community of Baltimore went a year without homicides after deploying a program called Safe Streets. And cities such as Oakland, Seattle and Philadelphia, where city leaders have invested in similar gun violence reduction programs, have seen drops in homicides when the programs were thriving, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s violent crime survey.And while the reasons for the ebb and flow of homicides can’t be reduced to one program or strategy, those working to build these programs up have been fighting for credit and acknowledgment.During the Biden administration, they got it. Their approaches finally found federal support with the creation of an office of gun violence prevention and federal dollars for community prevention groups working on the ground. In past years, programs have expanded across the US as more municipalities build their own offices of violence prevention.But these insights don’t appear to inform the Trump administration’s approach, Sherrills adds.“He’s not reading the data, he’s not looking at the trends and reports, it’s just more kneejerk reactions,” he said. “It’s shortsighted because they’re only speaking about one aspect of our criminal legal system.”This most recent crime debate comes nearly four months after the Trump administration cut nearly $170m in grants from gun violence prevention organizations, including several groups founded and co-founded by Sherrills who have had to lay off several staff members, dealing a serious blow to critical summertime programming.For small, upstart organizations this loss of funds puts their work in jeopardy, said Fredrick Womack, whose organization, Operation Good, lost 20% of its budget due to the April cuts.Womack says he was dismayed to hear the list of cities that Trump singled out, because they are all cities with Black leaders who have invested in community violence intervention. The calls for increased police and potential military presences, he says, shows a disconnect between the halls of power and the needs of the people most affected by violent crime.“How is the military going to provide support for victims when they need someone who’s going to be compassionate to what they’re going through?” He asked. “I know people want justice, but they also need support. They need healing and counseling.“They won’t go into the projects and ask the people how life is going for you. But they’ll look at someone who lives in the hills who heard a gunshot two miles away last week and say: ‘We have a crime problem,’” he continued.Womack founded Operation Good in 2013, and since then he and his small staff and gaggle of volunteers have worked with the teenagers and young men responsible for most of the city’s violence and given them odd jobs and taken them to civil rights museums so they can understand where they come from and gain a sense of community. Womack’s work has made a difference: in the years since the pandemic – which saw nationwide surges of gun violence – the homicide rate started to tick down, a change city officials have attributed in part to the work of community-based groups including Operation Good, and their collaboration with the police.Community leaders also argue that not only will Trump’s approach be less effective, it’s not aimed at helping the people most affected by violence. During a 12 August press conference, Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host who was recently appointed the US attorney for DC, argued that Trump’s rhetoric about crime and his administration’s approach to violence in DC were done in the name of victims. Flanked by posters of mostly Black teenagers and children killed by gun violence, Pirro argued that policies including DC’s Youth Rehabilitation Act have only emboldened perpetrators.“I guarantee you that every one of these individuals was shot and killed by someone who felt they were never gonna be caught,” Pirro told reporters.And when reporters asked about addressing the root causes of crime and violence and the recent cuts to community-based programs, Pirro argued that her focus is on being punitive, not preventive.For Leia Schenk, a Sacramento-based victim and violence prevention advocate, these sorts of sentiments, while common among conservatives, miss the point.“It’s tone-deaf and an oxymoron. The root causes are why we have victims,” Schenk said. “In my experience [crime and violence] come from systemic oppression. Meaning if a family can’t feed their kids, they’re gonna steal, rob or commit some sort of fraud to just live and survive.”Schenk has been working in the community advocacy space for more than three decades and in that time has seen the most successful approaches to youth crime, shootings and other forms of violence happen when schools districts, local mental and physical healthcare systems get a level of investment that matches the scale of the problem.“We’re seeing the most success when we are supported – from schools to law enforcement to churches – their support allows us to do what we’re doing on a bigger scale.”Despite the comments and moves from the Trump administration, Sherrills says the field of violence prevention will continue to thrive thanks to a strong foundation that was fortified in recent years due to federal support and increased support from philanthropic groups.“We know that we’re in challenging times but it’s about doubling down on success and making sure we preserve the wins,” he said. “We’re going to continue to see violence trend down because of the work practitioners are doing in the field. Folks are tired of the killing and the dying and are looking for alternative ways to create better ways of navigating a conflict so that it doesn’t lead to violence.” More

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      How Baltimore’s violent crime rate hit an all-time low: ‘This is not magic. It’s hard work’

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      The end of violence in Baltimore is a litany of stories that weren’t told in 90-second clips on the evening news, about shootings that didn’t happen.The untold stories sound different, said Sean Wees: “The guys had guns pointed at each other. We got in between.”One summer afternoon, two years ago, two men emerged from a corner store at Patapsco Avenue and Fifth Street, steps from Wees’s office at Safe Streets, in Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood.“They had a little face-off in the store,” Wees said. “Words were exchanged when they stepped out the store.”A woman in the neighborhood saw what was about to go down and banged on the door of Safe Streets, a longstanding city-run violence-prevention program and a fixture in Baltimore. Wees knows his community, and knew one of the men well – a guy with a high potential for violence. A shooter. The other guy was new, Wees said.The neighborhood was still reeling from a mass shooting that June. Safe Streets had de-escalated five fights at a Brooklyn Day block party, but weren’t on the scene when a gunfight started there late that night. Two people died, 28 were injured and Wees was on edge.He and his co-worker Corey Winfield rushed outside to find both men shouting at each other with guns drawn.View image in fullscreen“We stood in between,” Wees said. “Corey was talking to one, and I was talking to a guy that was from the community.” Wees and Winfield carefully talked them back from the cliff.“That’s why having that rapport and being very active in your community is real important with this work,” Wees said. “Because if you don’t have that rapport, you’re not going to get them to put away those guns, because you don’t know what this man is thinking. You don’t know if he had that respect for you, enough to not blow your brains out along with the next man.”Violent crime in America’s big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore’s improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.It confounds Baltimore’s bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders, and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon’s stories from The Wire or Donald Trump’s exasperating trash talk less relevant.But this metropolitan renaissance is born of agony.Before Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, there was Freddie Gray, rattled to death in the back of a Baltimore police department van.“We had, if you will, a head start with our uprising in 2015,” said Dr Lawrence Brown, a Baltimore historian and health equity researcher.View image in fullscreenGray’s death in April 2015 of spinal injuries set off an earthquake of protests against police brutality across the country, with none as consequential or long-lasting as those at the epicenter. Protests in Baltimore turned into riots.“Since 2015, there’s been here in Baltimore this acknowledgement that equity needs to be a priority,” Brown said. The riots were as much about the conditions of poverty that led to Gray’s death – people losing their homes in foreclosure to water bills, for example – as they were about police brutality, Brown noted.But the heavy-handed response by cops to the protests and failures to hold police accountable for misconduct eviscerated the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public. Baltimore’s state attorney Marilyn Mosby laid murder charges on the officers involved, and Baltimore’s police union closed ranks in response, eviscerating the relationship between police and politicians. And a series of scandals at city hall and the state attorney’s office – and the failure of Mosby’s charges to result in convictions – eviscerated the relationship between politicians and the public.Violence skyrocketed.Three months after Gray’s death, Baltimore’s homicide count set a 42-year record high. Baltimore’s mayor canned the police chief, then abandoned her re-election bid. In the previous year, 211 people had been killed in Baltimore, about 33.8 per 100,000 residents. That was high at the time relative to other large US cities, but reflected incremental improvement by Baltimore’s historical standards. After Freddie Gray’s death turned the city upside down, the count rose to 344 in 2015 – a 63% increase and a multi-decade high – bucking a long national trend of declining violent crime. The rate at which police made arrests in homicide cases cratered.View image in fullscreenThe gun trace taskforce (GTTF) scandal in 2017 exacerbated problems.Baltimore’s police culture revolved around statistics-driven measures of productivity, which Baltimore street cops often achieved by busting whoever happened to be convenient without concern about the quality of an arrest or the real criminality of a suspect, according to an internal report in the wake of the scandal.The GTTF had a reputation for aggressively pursuing arrests and putting up big numbers, insulating it from internal scrutiny. But a federal investigation revealed that the taskforce had long abandoned its mission to track down the source of illegal guns and had instead become a criminal gang prowling the street to rob drug dealers. Its officers planted guns and drugs on suspects and fabricated testimony to cover their tracks. More than a dozen police officers went to federal prison.Baltimore had tried more than one way to attack violent crime, from zero-tolerance “broken windows” policing to relying on neighborhood crime statistics to motivate police officers into making more arrests. Efforts to get guns off the street backfired spectacularly from political interference, incompetence and, with the GTTF, corruption.The scandal destroyed whatever public faith in Baltimore’s police department remained. By 2017, Baltimore’s homicide rate had risen to the highest of any large city in the US.“We had a police unit that was committing crimes. They were contributing to the crime,” Brown said. This history makes it hard to attribute the city’s current gains to police work, he added: “Who do I give credit to? Police are the lowest on my scales. It may be 5%. In some cases, at least with that gun trace taskforce, it’s negative.”Snake-bitten, adrift and in a state of profound civic despair, Baltimore’s leaders came to a fundamental consensus: reducing violence had to take priority over everything else. It was defining the city and was the only thing voters cared about.The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn’t quite seven years old.Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa) passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using Arpa money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny “defund the police” rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.“When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,” Scott said. “Folks said that we couldn’t do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn’t do it in the first place.”Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore’s political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington’s money.View image in fullscreenTrust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, the state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott’s antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan’s successes.Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence-intervention programs under the Department of Justice.Baltimore’s approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone’s door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.“We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,” Scott said. “They actually get a letter from me. And if they don’t do that – if they don’t take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state’s attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we’re holding people accountable.”Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.“Of the folks that we’ve been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,” Scott said. “You’re talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.”No one got killed in Baltimore last week. Also, the local paper’s reporters are quitting in droves. Surely, this is a coincidence.Summers bleed Baltimore. School is out. People congregate. Tempers flare. But between 27 July and 2 August, the homicide line of the Baltimore police department’s weekly crime report posted a shutout.Baltimore’s strategy revolves around focused deterrence. Take the kind of targeting advertisers use to put an ad up on your phone for mouthwash on a day you forgot to brush your teeth, and apply it to murder. Only, instead of an ad, someone at high risk for violence gets a case worker knocking on their door.“We’re talking about young people at elevated risk,” said Kurtis Palermo, who runs the youth violence-prevention non-profit Roca in Baltimore. “We’re not talking about the young person who says F-you to his teacher, or tells Mom, Dad, Grandma they don’t want to do XYZ. We’re talking about kids who literally have probably two tracks: jail and death.”Palermo knocks on doors while a cop is carrying the mayor’s letter. As often as not, he has to knock on a door a dozen times before he finds his charge.The process often begins after a shooting. Case workers at local hospitals treating gunshot victims will take note of a patient’s history and their friends and family. The data is combined with school records, police records, social services records and whatever else might be relevant; then the violence-prevention team will have a quick meeting. When they determine someone has enough risk factors, they intervene.View image in fullscreen“It could be anything from information that is gleaned on jail calls, video evidence, you know, whatever it is, and then the connections to other people,” said Terence Nash, chief of the group violence-reduction strategy (GVRS) in the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement.About 570,000 people live in Baltimore. If 200 people are murdered in the city in a year, the average person’s risk would be about one in 2,850. But almost all the violence is concentrated among a tiny, impoverished and identifiable subset of that 570,000: 2% or less of the city, Nash said. If 80% of 200 murders are in this cluster, then most people are facing a murder risk of a bit less than 14,000 to one, while the high-risk cluster’s odds are about one in 71.There’s no single factor that is perfectly predictive, Nash said. But as connections accumulate with other people at risk for violence, a threshold is crossed. The process is epidemiological, treating violence like an infection to track.Two types of people are most vulnerable, Nash said: people in their early 20s who are feuding over trivial matters, “someone looked at somebody wrong, somebody bumped into somebody”; and older people in the drug game, “more around violence that has to do with their criminal enterprise, and so it’s much more calculated”.Critically, it’s not every young person with an Instagram beef, and not every Sandtown neighborhood street dealer that rises to their attention. The risk factors create a reasonable, articulable – and legally defensible – basis for contact. The team looks at each person individually, and crafts an approach for each one, Nash said.“This is not magic. It’s hard work,” Nash said. “It takes attention to detail.”Jaylen was in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound when a life coach with Youth Advocate Programs (YAP) approached him. Jaylen had, he said, been in the wrong part of West Baltimore at the wrong time. He wasn’t especially receptive at first to a life coach, of all things, he said.“I thought there was a catch,” the 20-year-old said. “I thought I’d have to pay them back in the future.”Jaylen couldn’t say much about his life or where he was: people might still want to hurt him. But it took a couple of months of outreach for the offer of help from Teshombae Harvell, Jaylen’s life coach, to look real. It took consistency.“It’s about the follow-up,” Harvell said. “Today they might say get the F out of here. Tomorrow, they could be wanting services, because something tragic happened where they need change.”When someone gets shot, Jaylen expects someone to retaliate, he said: “Back and forth, back and forth. It’s never-ending.”What Harvell offered – what no one had offered in a credible way before – was a plan for the future, and perhaps the realization that he had a future. Jaylen had thought about killing someone before, he said. He felt as if the prospect of surviving long enough to have a legit life wasn’t worth considering.Now he has a driver’s license and wants to become a plumber. Helping fix some of Baltimore’s stubborn oversupply of abandoned houses would be a living, and ironically would be paying back the city for its help.“The only way programs like YAP or GVRS are going to be successful is for people to buy in,” said Harvell. “They can’t be spectators on the outside, looking in, wondering if it’s going to be a success or a failure.”Brandon Scott’s approach offers benefits to get people out of the street and off a violent path: housing, victim assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, job training.“There’s the carrot and stick,” said Ivan Bates. “We’re the stick.”Bates had a pretty good track record of getting drug dealers off the hook before winning election as Baltimore’s state’s attorney – what most places call the district attorney and chief prosecutor. Baltimore’s history of light prosecutions for handgun cases is a legacy of questionable policing practices – weakly supported cases landing in court – and a negative view of mass incarceration by prosecutors.“I was the one who was beating the brakes off the state,” Bates said. “Look, my law partner and I went 25, 26 straight jury trials against Baltimore city prosecutors representing some pretty rough people, you know. And when I come and say that the street – the criminal elements – do not respect that approach, I’m not saying it because I read in a book. I’m saying it because I lived it.”After defeating Mosby and assuming office in January 2023, Bates immediately reversed her policy of non-prosecution for low-level offenses like drug possession, prostitution and trespassing. He successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature to increase the penalty for illegal gun possession from three years to five years. And he started putting people in prison.View image in fullscreenIn Mosby’s last two years in office, 2,186 people faced felony gun charges. Mosby dismissed about 34% and another 30% received plea bargains, mostly without imprisonment. In Bates’s first two years, the number of cases increased a bit, to 2,443. Bates only dismissed 19% of the cases, and only 10% received plea agreements. The rest were convicted – an increase of about 1,000 people sent to prison – which includes a 70% increase in homicide convictions.“Everybody has a plan. The mayor had his plan. The police department, they have their plan,” Bates said. “And when I came and I ran for office, I had my plan. The plans have to work together as one.”Bates is quick to attribute the city’s reduction in violence to a team effort. For example, without victim assistance – which is supported by a federal grant – prosecutions that would have fallen apart in previous years concluded in convictions because witnesses could be found to appear in court. Police now are actually focused on removing illegal guns from the street, he said.It also requires people to have an out. Without a path off the street, people on the edge in Baltimore will do what they must to survive, he said.He rejects the suggestion that his approach is a return to mass incarceration. Prosecution is not zero tolerance and it is not indifferent to a defendant’s conditions.“We have focused on violent repeat offenders, not the first-time kid,” Bates said. “Remember, 5,000-6,000 individuals are doing this type of behavior. So, we’re not here to go back to mass incarceration.”But he’s sensitive to how this approach plays out in five years.“My No 1 worry is, when individuals come home, we have to have something for them,” he said. “Did we actually prepare them to come home? … Look, I believe everybody pays a debt to society. We move on, and then we as a society put them in a place that they can win. And if we didn’t, then we’re going to see these numbers bounce back up.”Sean Wees from Safe Streets said stopping a shooting might come down to noticing that a kid on a street corner has holes in his shoes.“So we asked the little kid, are you hungry?” Wees said. “That could lead to a conversation where you find out this kid is not eating. But we have the resources, or if we don’t have them at that time, we find the resources to help this family out. And now that key individual, that target individual, is the father of that child … We fed his child now, we’ve started to build a rapport with this guy, because he’s going to be appreciative of the work that we just did. That’s how this works.”View image in fullscreenOne might think that the thing that prevents expanding the work is personnel. Very few people have the street credibility, the devotion and the nerve to be successful. But Wees said the constraint is actually money.“I love this work, because I’m always trying to save an individual life,” he said. “I’m good with this work. The time and the money don’t match right now, but guess what? I still do this work … You get more money, people will put in more time.”For the first time in forever, Charm City’s leaders are all pulling in the same direction, and crime is falling through the floor. They’ve placated violence in inventive and predictable ways. They are, of course, justifiably concerned that Donald Trump will undo their successes on Republican “screw cities” general principles.Trump closed the White House office of gun violence prevention on the first day he took office. Three months later, the Department of Justice cut the $300m allocated to community violence-intervention grants in half, including many in Baltimore. The cuts were part of a larger $811m culling across the office of justice programs, Reuters reported. Funding for gun-violence victims’ services, conflict mediation, social workers, hospital-based programs: gone.Scott blasted the cuts to the program’s partners as dangerous and reckless.“You’re talking about an administration who has said for years that they want to drive down crime in these cities,” he said. “The truth is no one cares if the mayor is a Republican or Democrat in any city when it comes to gun violence.”The youth antiviolence organization Roca had three grants terminated, one in Baltimore with about $1m left unspent. The termination letter said the grant did not align with its priorities including “directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combating violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault”.As applied to Roca, the rationale is absurd. But they could see it coming, said Dwight Robson, a Roca executive.“Initially, it was a huge blow. We were estimating that we were going to serve roughly 60 fewer young people a year,” Robson said. After an outcry, funders outside the federal government, including the city itself, started to step in, who “made it clear that they don’t want to lose momentum” in Baltimore.Support in other places, like Boston, is fleeting, in part because they’ve done their job too well, Robson said: “Boston is the safest big city in America. And you know, the homicides and crime just aren’t on people’s radars to the degree that it is in Baltimore.”Roca has appealed the decision to cut their grant, and a coalition of non-profits is suing the Trump administration, arguing that the cuts were made unlawfully.The real threat posed by the cuts is continuity, said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement (Monse). The violence-intervention plan has worked in part because it has been consistent. People are so used to the presence of Monse staffers around crime scenes and in high-violence neighborhoods that some people have come to expect a knock on the door after a shooting.View image in fullscreenIf Monse’s partners start disappearing, and if they can’t back up promises of help made to victims – or shooters – then things may fall apart, she said.“We’ve got to make the investment in the service side of things,” Mavronis said. “We can’t just make empty promises to folks who we are telling we have the services for you to change your life.”Baltimore’s leaders, both in city hall and in the streets, have been putting their reputations and capital on the line, in some cases risking their lives.Budget cuts while they’re winning makes it look like they want Baltimore to lose. The exasperation is plain.“We have the lowest amount of violence that we’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’m 41 years old,” Scott said. “If everyone says that they agree that this is the top issue, that we have to make sure that more people are not becoming a victim of these things, why change it? Why disrupt the apple cart, if the apple cart is producing the best results that we’ve seen in a generation?” More

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      Washington DC and White House agree to scale back Trump ‘takeover’ of city police

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      White House officials and attorneys for Washington DC have agreed to scale back the Trump administration’s takeover of the city’s police department.Under an agreement announced early Friday evening, the US capital city’s Metropolitan police department will remain under the control of its chief, Pamela Smith, instead of Terry Cole, the top administrator for the Drug and Enforcement Administration (DEA), according to reports.A revised directive Bondi issued late on Friday referred to Cole instead as her “designee” for purposes of directing the DC mayor “to provide such services of the Metropolitan Police Department as the attorney general deems necessary and appropriate”.Those services, according to Bondi’s two-page order, would include assisting federal immigration enforcement, contrary to DC “sanctuary city” policies constraining metropolitan police department action on immigration.Friday’s pact would also allow the Trump administration to use Metropolitan police department officers for federal purposes in emergencies.It comes after Washington DC sought an emergency restraining order on Friday against Donald Trump’s takeover of its police department, dubbing it a “hostile takeover” of law enforcement in the nation’s capital. US district judge Ana C Reyes had signaled that she would issue a temporary restraining order scaling back the Trump White House’s takeover of DC’s metropolitan police if the administration did not alter the arrangement by Friday evening.Reyes, during oral arguments on Friday, expressed skepticism that the Trump administration has legal authority to run the city’s police force or that Cole could effectively take charge of the department as its chief.“I still do not understand on what basis the president, through the attorney general, through Mr. Cole, can say: ‘You, police department, can’t do anything unless I say you can,’” Reyes told a justice department lawyer.The District of Columbia attorney general, Brian Schwalb, filed a lawsuit on Friday morning, hours after the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, late on Thursday issued an order for the federal government to impose a new police chief on the city’s Metropolitan police department (MPD).Schwalb says the US president and his administration are going beyond legal federal power over the nation’s capital, and he wants a judge to rule that control of the police remains in district hands. The justice department and the White House haven’t commented.“By declaring a hostile takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its limited, temporary authority under the Home Rule Act,” the lawsuit says.The Trump administration named Cole as the “emergency police commissioner” over Washington DC – a move that further escalated federal control of the city – but were immediately challenged by local leaders, who then sued.Federalized national guard troops were ordered into the city four days ago as Donald Trump declared a crisis of crime and homelessness there, amid outrage from opponents.Bondi put Cole in charge of the capital’s police department, saying he would assume the “powers and duties vested in the District of Columbia Chief of Police”.She said police department personnel “must receive approval from Commissioner Cole” before issuing any orders. It was not immediately clear where the move left Smith, who works for the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser.Bowser promptly hit back, saying late on Thursday in a social media post: “In reference to the US Attorney General’s order, there is no statute that conveys the District’s personnel authority to a federal official.”Bowser included a letter from Schwalb to Smith opining that Bondi’s order was “unlawful”and that Smith was “not legally obligated to follow it”.“Members of MPD must continue to follow your orders and not the orders of any official not appointed by the Mayor,” Schwalb wrote in the letter to Smith.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBondi’s directive came hours after Smith directed MPD officers to share information regarding people not in custody – such as someone involved in a traffic stop or checkpoint – with federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).But, as a so-called sanctuary city, DC police would still be prevented by local law from providing federal immigration agencies with the personal information of an undocumented person in MPD custody, including their release details, location or photos, and cannot arrest people on the basis of their immigration status or let immigration officials question subjects in police custody.But the justice department said Bondi disagreed with the police chief’s directive because it allowed for continued enforcement of “sanctuary policies”, and the US attorney general said she was rescinding Smith’s order.The DC power struggle is the latest move by the US president and his administration to test the limits of federal authority, relying on obscure statutes and a subjective declaration of a crisis to bolster a hardline approach to crime and immigration.Bondi also sent anti-sanctuary-city letters to the mayors of 32 cities and a handful of county executives across the US, warning that she intends to prosecute political leaders who are not in her view sufficiently supportive of immigration enforcement.Leaders in Democratic-led cities dispute the administration’s characterizations that their cities are overrun with lawlessness, including unhoused people with substance abuse and mental health issues contributing to an increase in homeless and tent encampments.They say that while Washington has grappled with spikes in violence and visible homelessness, the city’s homicide rate also ranks below those of several other major US cities and the capital is not in the throes of the public safety collapse the administration has portrayed.Trump earlier praised Smith’s directive to share information with federal agencies.“That’s a very positive thing. I have heard that just happened,” Trump said of Smith’s order. “That’s a great step. That’s a great step if they’re doing that.”Bowser, walking a tightrope between the Republican White House and the constituency of her largely Democratic city, was out of town on Thursday for a family commitment in Martha’s Vineyard, fetching her child from summer camp, but would be back on Friday, her office said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘It’s not illegal to be homeless’: disquiet as Trump crews clear DC encampments

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      For the past eight months, David Harold Pugh has found his “spot” outside the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington DC. He keeps all his belongings, including a guitar, tied up together on a two-wheeled buggy.“This is shelter. It’s a safe place where I can put my buggy up against the wall, and it’s up against that beam so nobody can roll it,” said Pugh. “I roll it on its back, and then I sleep alongside of it, so nobody can get it without me waking up.”He’s one of the more than 5,000 people in the city without a permanent place to live and now facing uncertainty about where to find shelter after Donald Trump said homeless people in DC must be moved far from the city.Crews tore down a major encampment near the Kennedy Center on Thursday, with federal law enforcement removing residents and clearing out the remaining encampments across the city overnight. The removal is part of Trump’s federal takeover of the city’s police department and deployment of the national guard across the city.Pugh believes the Trump administration is out of line for blaming crime on unhoused individuals. “It’s not illegal to be homeless,” he said.Despite the widespread encampment closures, Pugh told the Guardian he didn’t have any plans to visit a shelter this week and wanted to stay close to his spot. “If they tell me to roll, I’ll roll and I’ll come back when they leave,” he said.View image in fullscreenIn an encampment across the city, near the interchange of Rock Creek Parkway and Whitehurst Freeway, one homeless individual, who identified himself as G, had already packed up his belongings. He said he had had to bounce around to various locations over the last few weeks.“It’s just going with the punches,” said G. “So you just never get settled. It feels like you [are] on the edge.”G is also just days away from moving off the streets and into permanent housing. He said the only thing he’s missing is a new social security card, which he will have very soon, but until then, he’s not sure where he will go.“What am I supposed to do for six days? Am I supposed to tell the national guard, or whoever, I got six days? Gonna get six days, and I literally have the appointment at the social security [office] on the 20th,” said G.With encampments now closed around DC and just a few days before he can secure stable housing, G said he may consider staying at a shelter.“I know the shelters might be full. I don’t even know where a shelter is, they haven’t gave us any list. No, nothing. They just made us fully aware of possibilities,” he said.According to the DC office of the deputy mayor for health and human services, unhoused residents who want shelter will not be turned away, and the city is prepared to expand capacity as necessary.View image in fullscreenBut if homeless individuals refuse to leave encampments, the Trump administration said their options are limited.During a news briefing earlier this week, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said homeless individuals could face fines or even jail time if they refused to go to a shelter or receive addiction or mental health services.“We’re in the business of making sure people have the information, they have the connection to resources if they choose, but then people are, you know, left up to make their own decisions,” said Kierstin Quinsland, chief program officer at Miriam’s Kitchen, a homeless service provider in DC. “However, it is extremely concerning that people are being threatened with arrest if they are refusing services.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center said many unhoused people sleep outside in DC and across the nation because rent is too expensive. “Arresting or ticketing people for sleeping outside makes homelessness worse, wastes taxpayer money and simply does not work. The solution to homelessness is housing and supports, not handcuffs and jails,” said Rabinowitz in a written statement.Quinsland said advocates and community partners have mobilized to keep an eye on encampment closures to make sure unhoused individuals are offered support and “treated as respectfully as possible”.She said one of their biggest concerns about these federal police sweeps is losing contact with homeless residents. In many cases, Quinsland said advocates work with members of the city’s unhoused population for weeks, months or longer if they are trying to move them toward permanent housing.“Trust is an issue in homeless outreach, you know. A lot of folks [who] are outside, they decline shelter for a reason, because they don’t trust services,” said Quinsland. “So these relationships that we have with folks are precious, and they are hard fought.”View image in fullscreenAdvocates also warn that these citywide encampment closures may separate homeless individuals from critical support and social services.“If they’re moved somewhere where they don’t know where they can get a meal, they don’t even know how to get back to the neighborhoods that they’re familiar with,” said Quinsland.Ahead of the encampment closures, Quinsland said outreach street teams with Miriam’s Kitchen have been passing inexpensive mobile phones to unhoused residents to help them stay connected.“Making sure that they have our phone numbers, have our business cards with them, to make sure that wherever they may end up, we can remain in contact,” she said.With Trump’s temporary takeover of the DC police department in place for the next few weeks, Quinsland said there had also been discussion about bussing homeless residents to neighboring areas like Montgomery county, Maryland, or parts of Virginia to be “out of sight of Donald Trump”.But that’s just a temporary fix, she said, as homeless service providers need more funding to address the issue.“The long-term answer is, if we have the political will to put money in the city budget for housing, then we can do that,” said Quinsland. “This year, there is zero dollars in the budget for permanent supportive housing vouchers, so that’s not a help.” More

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      Trump falsely claims crime in US capital is ‘worst it’s ever been’ as protesters confront federal officers

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      Donald Trump falsely claimed that crime in Washington DC is “the “worst it’s ever been” on Thursday, amid an ongoing federal takeover of the city’s police department and deployment of the national guard and federal agents in the city.“Washington DC is at its worst point,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “It will soon be at its best point.” He also baselessly accused DC law enforcement officials of giving “phony crime stats” and said “they’re under investigation”.The president’s comments came after protesters heckled federal law enforcement officials as they reportedly stopped dozens of cars at a checkpoint along a busy street in Washington DC on Wednesday night.About 20 law enforcement officers, some of whom appeared to be from the Department of Homeland Security, pulled over drivers for infractions such as broken taillights and not wearing seatbelts, according to the Washington Post. At least one woman was reportedly arrested as more than 100 protesters gathered and reportedly yelled things like “get off our streets”, according to NBC News. Some protesters began warning drivers to avoid the area, the outlet reported.Nearly 800 national guard troops have begun arriving in the city this week and the Department of Defense said on Thursday that about 200 national guard members at a time will be on the streets to support federal and local law enforcement. The White House says officials have made more than 100 arrests since Trump announced the takeover on Monday. The Metropolitan police department (MPD) said it made 74 arrests on Wednesday and has made 217 arrests since Monday.The chief of the MPD also reportedly issued an executive order on Thursday allowing the department to notify Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents about undocumented immigrants they find during traffic stops. Previously, the department could not report immigrants to Ice if they had not been charged with a crime. Trump on Thursday called it a “great step”, declining to say whether he pressured the police department to enter into the agreement. “I think that’s going to happen all over the country,” he said.DC’s Home Rule Act of 1973 allows the president to take control of the city’s police force for 30 days for “federal purposes” that the president “may deem necessary and appropriate”. Trump has suggested he will seek to extend that past 30 days. Doing so would require authorization from Congress.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, said on Wednesday that his party would not support Trump’s efforts to extend the takeover. “No fucking way,” Schumer said during a podcast interview with Aaron Parnas. “We’ll fight him tooth and nail.”If Congress doesn’t grant the extension, Trump suggested on Wednesday he could declare an emergency to unilaterally extend the takeover.“If it’s a national emergency we can do it without Congress, but we expect to be before Congress very quickly,” Trump said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has portrayed the US capital as a crime-ridden metropolis. However, violent crime in DC hit a 30-year low in 2024 after a spike in 2023.“We don’t live in a dirty city,” Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, told community groups on Tuesday. “We are not 700,000 scumbags and punks. We don’t have neighborhoods that should be bulldozed. We have to be clear about our story.”Phil Mendelson, a Democrat serving as the chair of the Washington DC city council, told the Washington Post that despite Trump’s politicization of the takeover, the relationship between law enforcement agencies had actually been collaborative.“I think collaborating with MPD and providing additional resources can only be for the good,” he said. “But the president has a national platform, and he’s painted the city as a cesspool of crime. We know that’s not true, but that is damaging to the city.” More

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      Trump’s DC takeover harkens back to a dark incident 33 years ago – when crime was far worse

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      Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s police department and decision to deploy the national guard was sparked by the assault of a former Doge staffer who nicknamed himself “Big Balls”. Thirty-three years ago, a fatal attack on a congressional staffer also provoked an effort by the federal government to impose law and order on the nation’s capital – but in that case, it came from Capitol Hill.On Monday, Trump said he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.”In 1992, it was the death of 25-year-old Tom Barnes, a staffer for Senator Richard Shelby, a Democrat of Alabama, that prompted the senator to introduce legislation to legalize the death penalty in the district. Shelby, a conservative Democrat who would become a Republican two years later, acknowledged that many DC community leaders had historically been opposed to the death penalty, but argued that the tide had changed – using similar dystopian language as Trump.“The terror that comes with living in a war zone has prompted many residents to reconsider the appropriateness, ethically and legally, of a death penalty,” Shelby wrote in a March 1992 Washington Post op-ed. “… People are using guns to settle arguments about clothes and girlfriends. They are ‘smoking’ others because they feel like it. They will even ‘bust a cap in you’ if they don’t like the way you look at them.”In announcing the police takeover on Monday, Trump cited the attack on Edward Coristine, whom he said was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”. He also referenced the June slaying of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, an intern for the Republican representative Ron Estes, of Kansas, who was killed by crossfire in a drive-by shooting. Last week, his mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told ABC News that she supported Trump’s idea of a federal takeover, which he had threatened in a social media post.There was one key difference between then and now: Trump is painting an exaggerated picture of crime in DC, where violent crime is at a 30-year low. But back in January 1992, Washington really was a crime-plagued city. It was coming off a year that saw 482 murders in 1991, earning it the ignoble title of the murder capital of the US. By contrast, there were 187 homicides last year and the city is on pace for a lower number this year.According to the book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington DC by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Barnes, the Shelby staffer, left his home on a Saturday night in January 1992 to go to the corner store to get coffee grounds for the next morning. A group of teenagers approached him and demanded his money or they’d “put a cap” in him. “Leave me alone,” Barnes replied, and turned up the street. One of them shot him in the head, landing him in a coma. He died four days later, marking the 22nd homicide of the new year.A Capitol Outrage, ran the headline on a Tuscaloosa News editorial two days later. “Beset by drug-related violence,” the newspaper declared, “Washington has become a national disgrace, an American embarrassment.”“Tom’s death was the catalyst for my involvement in trying to find solutions to the violent crime that plagues our city,” said Shelby, who had known Barnes since he was a toddler.His bill to impose the death penalty on DC failed, but he did get Congress to vote to force the city to hold a referendum on that fall’s ballot asking Washingtonians to authorize capital punishment. “The criminal justice system is out of control in this city and Congress is not going to turn its back on this issue,” Shelby said. Even some home-rule champions on the Hill voted with Shelby, such as Leon Panetta, a Democratic representative from California.“I really think the District of Columbia ought to handle its own affairs,” said Panetta, who would go on to serve as chief of staff to Bill Clinton, CIA director and defense secretary. “But crime continues to be a very serious problem in the district. Part of it is the urban crisis that is part of every city’s social and economic problems. But I don’t get the sense that the district has a strong commitment to confront this issue.”The DC council had repealed the death penalty in 1981, but the last execution in Washington took place in 1957, years before the city won home rule in 1973.This week, Washington leaders bristled at Trump’s takeover of the police. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate representing DC in the House of Representatives, called it “an historic assault on DC home rule”, while the mayor, Muriel E Bowser, described it as “unsettling and unprecedented”.There was a similarly visceral reaction to Shelby’s death penalty referendum.“There is something approaching rage among the voters of the district about their disempowerment, about Congress forcing this on us,” said Norton, who was in her first term in Congress at the time. “When you mandate a death penalty vote, you engage that issue directly.”Leading up to the referendum, dozens of ministers denounced it at Sunday sermons, the Washington Post reported.On 3 November 1992 – the same day Democrat Bill Clinton won his first presidential election – Washingtonians rejected the death penalty referendum by a 2-1 margin.“Today the voters sent a powerful message to every member of the US Congress that we are citizens of this country,” the then mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, said after the vote, while Norton said the vote showed the city “will not tolerate this interference from the outside”.But the climate of fear around crime had won some support for capital punishment.“In neighborhoods across the city, among rich and poor, black and white, some residents have argued that violence has become so random and brutal that convicted killers should be punished with the ultimate act of retribution, regardless of whether it serves as a deterrent,” the Post reported. But others cited concerns that it would be used unfairly against Black defendants, or didn’t like Congress interfering in the city’s affairs, in their votes against it.Even the city council chair, John Wilson, who supported the death penalty, urged a no vote as a signifier of DC’s independence. (Today, the city hall is named for him.)“It’s not that they didn’t favor the death penalty,” Jaffe and Sherwood wrote of DC voters. “Many black Washingtonians are quite conservative, law-and-order advocates … They just resented a white senator from Alabama telling them that they needed a death penalty to make their streets safe.”Today, there is definitely some resentment at a white president from New York who says he wants to clean up the city streets. And Bowser is using it as a way to rally support for the long-held goal of DC statehood.“My message to residents is this: we know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” she said at a news conference after Trump’s takeover. “That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia. We are American citizens. Our families go to war. We pay taxes, and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.”

      Frederic J Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications More

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      Texas Senate passes Republican-drawn gerrymandered map as House Democrats continue to deny quorum – live updates

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      The Texas Sentate has passed a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.The map passed 19-2 along party lines. Nine Senate Democrats left the floor in solidarity with their House colleagues – who broke quorum again earlier today in protest of the map. The legislation can’t advance without the absent Democrats in the lower chamber.Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.“I’ll call special after special until the Texas first agenda is passed,” Abbott said in a post on X.The Trump administration sanctioned an armed group accused of illegally trading minerals in eastern Congo, as Washington seeks to lead peace efforts in the region while securing US access to its mineral resources.A senior US government official told the AP that the state and treasury departments are targeting the Codeco armed group, which controlled the key coltan mining site of Rubaya from 2022 until early 2024.“During this period, Codeco generated revenue by overseeing mining operations, collecting illegal fees and taxes for miners and engaging in mineral smuggling. It also imposed forced labor and executed civilians in mining areas under its control,” the official said.The sanctions also target the Congolese mining company CDMC, accused of selling minerals sourced and smuggled from mines near Rubaya, as well as two Hong Kong exporters, East Rise and Star Dragon, that purchased minerals from the area.Mexico has transferred a group of imprisoned cartel members to the United States, amid growing pressure from the Trump administration to dismantle the country’s powerful drug organizations, the Wall Street Journal reported.The group, sent on Tuesday, was roughly the same size as the 29 prisoners transferred in February.WSJ reports:
      The group sent Tuesday included members of top criminal organizations facing drug charges in the US who are being sent to locations including Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, San Diego and New York, one of the people said.
      Terry Cole, the Drug Enforcement Administration chief overseeing the federal takeover of DC police, said in an interview that, starting tonight, federal agents will be “embedded with the Metropolitan police department”.“You will see federal agents working hand in hand on patrol with the Metropolitan Police Department, you will also see an increase of activity, patrol activity in certain sectors to go after the violent criminal offenders that are the drivers of this crime,” Cole said in an interview with Fox News.Earlier today, Texas Senate Democrats staged a walkout in protest of the chamber’s proposed congressional redistricting map, which was moving forward to the Texas House.Despite the senators’ absence, the Republican-controlled Senate approved the map in a 19-2 vote. But it cannot win final approval while the quorum is broken. Texas House Democrats have been out of state for weeks to block Republican lawmakers from conducting business.Senate Democrats are challenging governor Greg Abbott’s decision to prioritize redistricting over urgent flood relief for the state’s affected communities.“This special session is about one thing: flood relief,” said Texas state senator Roland Gutierrez. “Greg Abbott tried to sneak in a rigged mid-decade redistricting beneath voters’ noses. Let’s be clear, the governor can provide this relief anytime he wants. But Abbott is holding it hostage so that he has an excuse to do Trump’s bidding.”“Texas has a long tradition of independence. But when Donald Trump tells Greg Abbott to roll over and fetch him five seats, he does it like a good lapdog,” Gutierrez added. “This governor has failed to uphold Texas values, defend the people of Texas, or make the lives of its citizens better in any meaningful way.”Democratic senators Judith Zaffirini and Chuy Hinojosa did not participate in today’s walkout and stayed in the chamber, according to the Dallas Morning News.Democratic representative Adam Smith, of the state of Washington, said it is “pretty clear” President Trump “wants his own domestic police force” after the president seized control of DC’s Metropolitan police department.“Look, this president is trampling on basic freedoms of the American people to a degree we, I don’t think we’ve ever seen,” Smith said on CNN. “You see that with what the ICE agents are doing, in terms of picking people up off the streets with no evidence, no due process, locking people up.”“This is happening all across the country,” Smith added. “Look, it’s pretty clear the president wants his own domestic police force, and step by step, he’s trying to create it, and we should be deeply alarmed by that, regardless of how you feel about crime in Washington DC, or any other city.”

      National guard troops began to arrive at their headquarters in Washington DC on Tuesday, after Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was deploying them to the nation’s capital and putting city police under federal control, even though the violent crime rate is at a 30-year low. Leading Democrats have called the move a “distraction” from the president’s economic agenda and the plague of the Epstein files.

      Earlier, the DC mayor Muriel Bowser met with attorney general Pam Bondi, after saying that her office intends to comply with federal law enforcement, as Bondi will now oversee the DC police for the next 30 days. On social media, Bondi described the meeting as “productive”, saying the pair agreed there is “nothing more important” than keeping residents and tourists “safe from deadly crime”.

      Meanwhile in the White House briefing room today, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president’s DC police takeover was “just the beginning”, saying that the massive surge in law enforcement resulted in 23 arrests yesterday. She added that if individuals living in homeless encampments refuse to accept places in shelters or addiction facilities they would be subject to fines or jail time. Leavitt added that the administration is still considering moving the homeless population out of the city.

      Beyond Washington, the press secretary characterised Friday’s upcoming meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin as a “listening exercise” for the president, confirming that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would not be in attendance, but the president has hopes for a trilateral meeting in the future.

      For his part, Zelenskyy said today that Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire, because Moscow would use it as a springboard to start a future war. Speaking to journalists a day before a virtual meeting with US and European leaders, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin wanted to dominate his country because he “does not want a sovereign Ukraine”.

      Closer to home, the Texas Sentate approved a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. But since House Democrats continue to break quorum, the legislation isn’t going anywhere. Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.

      When it comes to the economy, the latest inflation data released today showed that the Consumer Price Index held steady at 2.7 percent. “Core” inflation – which leaves out volatile goods like food and energy to track how prices are increasing – rose by 0.3 percent. This marks a 3.1 percent increase over the course of a year – and the highest level in five months.

      In response, Donald Trump wasted no time calling out Jerome Powell on social media, continuing his long-running campaign against the chair of the Federal Reserve. “The damage he has done by always being Too Late is incalculable,” the president wrote. He also said that he was considering allowing a lawsuit – focused on Powell’s renovation of the fed’s headquarters– to proceed.
      The New York Times is reporting that investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is “at least in part” responsible for a recent hack of the computer system of the federal court system.According to the Times’s sources, this breach includes highly sensitive records that could contain information with names and details of people charged with national security crimes.The Times also reports that it’s not immediately clear what specific Russian entity might be responsible for the hack.Just a quick post here to sum up the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which breaks down the financial impact of Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill that became law last month.The topline: the CBO estimates that the poorest 10% of Americans can expect to lose around $1200 per year due to the restrictions and cut backs in the legislation – namely when it comes to Medicaid and Snap benefits. By contrast, the richest 10% of Americans can expect to gain around $13,600 each year, due to the extension of the president’s 2017 tax cuts.In response to Congressional Democratic leadership’s request for analysis on the distribution of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a letter from the CBO’s director noted that while, on average, American households can expect to see an increase in resources, this will not be evenly distributed.He writes:
      Resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.
      The Trump administration is evidently extending its control of cultural representation at the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex.In a letter obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the White House told the Smithsonian that it plans a wide review of exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2026.The letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, from Trump administration officials said the White House wants the museums’ program to reflect “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in keeping with an executive order issued in March that ordered the elimination of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums.Donald Trump’s order from March, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, said the president “aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud”.But Monday’s letter to the institution, according to the Journal, places the institution under curatorial scrutiny ranging from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire because Moscow would use what it gained as a springboard to start a future war.The Ukrainian president said he did not believe that Donald Trump supported Russia’s demands, and he expressed hope the US leader would act as an honest mediator when he meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.He added there was no sign that Russia was preparing to implement a ceasefire, as reports emerged that small sabotage groups had pierced Ukrainian defences in the eastern Donbas, advancing about six miles in three days. Zelenskyy also warned that Russia was planning new offensives on three parts of the frontline.Speaking to journalists in the run-up to the Trump-Putin summit, and a day before a virtual meeting with US and European leaders, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin wanted to dominate his country because he “does not want a sovereign Ukraine”.Read more on the lead-up to both meetings hereThe Texas Sentate has passed a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.The map passed 19-2 along party lines. Nine Senate Democrats left the floor in solidarity with their House colleagues – who broke quorum again earlier today in protest of the map. The legislation can’t advance without the absent Democrats in the lower chamber.Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.“I’ll call special after special until the Texas first agenda is passed,” Abbott said in a post on X.The White House heralded today’s Consumer Price Index report as an clear picture of inflation remaining stable.But another notable exchange in the press briefing was a reporter’s question about why the public should trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation data report, given the administration undermining the jobs data released earlier this month. This led to the firing of former commissioner Erika McEntarfer, and yesterday’s announcement that the president is nominating EJ Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to replace her. Antoni is a longtime critic of the BLS.“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said, referring to the routine practice of issuing revisions to provide a more accurate picture of data. “We want to ensure that all of the data, the inflation data, the jobs data, any data point that is coming out of the BLS, is trustworthy and is accurate”.When asked in today’s press briefing, the White House offered little clarity on administration’s view of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza City takeover.
      This is, of course, an incredibly complex and complicated situation. The administration has made our goal clear. We want to see this conflict end. We want to see the hostages released…the President and his national security team has given extensive effort and time in doing that. More