You probably drove by the National Mall if you drove by it the last couple of days and saw something odd but familiar: camouflage-wearing National Guardsmen with federal officials as the others have their photo taken with the Washington Monument and the Capitol. It’s not some theme-park fright—here’s the unvarnished hard fact behind the new policy to send National Guard troops onto Washington, D.C.’s city streets, a show of federal bruisiness. The reason, officials claim, is to curb rising crime and homelessness, but its validity is in doubt, mixing law, politics, and opinion in ways that have ignited nationwide debate. In its sights is the military regulation of domestic labor.
And today, nearly 150 years later, is the anniversary of the day when the Posse Comitatus Act came into force, and it bequeaths to us the deeply rooted tradition: federal troops aren’t generally supposed to be behaving like police officers in civilian clothes. It’s intended to maintain the distinction between military and everyday police business, with the sole exception of in the case of insurrection, rebellion, or other extraordinary situations. Washington, D.C., is legally in a state of technical suspension. Compared with state National Guards accountable only to their governors by the temporary one-shot exception of federalization, the D.C. Guard is commanded by the president. That special status has been employed by recent presidents as an instrument for the deployment of troops on law-enforcement missions short of technically invoking the Insurrection Act with loopholes political and practical. The latest deployment sent some 800 D.C.
National Guardsmen into the city, and soldiers into the city from outside to support them. It was a test case for cities to send soldiers like that into other cities. Destination tourist spots like the National Mall, which is one of the safest destinations to visit in the city to begin with, have been affected. To its residents, the relocation has always been described as so much ado and so little substance in terms of a crime problem.
An examination of the statistics makes the point. D.C.’s crime rate bottomed out last year. Murders fell by about a third, robberies by about 40 percent, and carjackings by more than half. The city has been described politically as gang- and violence-ravaged, but in the statistics, the missing part is.
There is no crime epidemic behind the action, the mayor asserts, but an exercise of power in public space. The federal occupation and military occupation had altered the tone of the city. Strangers take photos smiling for photos with soldiers, while neighbors are perplexed, traumatized, and enraged.
Tourists and residents had built a world in which the city did not exist as such but performed, in which the troops were sent fewer to defend and flaunt themselves than to be gawked at. There have been economic effects as well. Reservations for diners declined by a quarter, and tourists and residents did not flow down tank-lined streets. Economists avow that he deployment is injecting uncertainty that is undermining urban life day by day, suffocating workers and entrepreneurs.
Legal analysts also joined in. Federal courts recently found only a minority of the deployments there to be unconstitutional under the Posse Comitatus Act, and clearly placed on the books and in practice, federal troops cannot be deployed to fill a civilian police gap except in the face of an actual emergency or insurrection. These choices mirror the on-paper tension between city and federal authority and are ongoing in the process of being worked out in D.C.
The case also faults the National Guard itself. They are mostly citizen-soldiers with civilian jobs and families. They resent lost service, and their local neighborhood hometown communities stretched to the breaking point are employed on high-glamour city operations when there is no actual national emergency.
The federal military has always been called only inside cities in past situations—natural disaster, insurrection, or where city militaries are outnumbered in numbers.
That is no longer the way it works. It parachutes troops into the city defense zones with little input from city governments and by perceived threat, not reality. Legal watchdogs warn. These business-as-usual occurrences would demilitarize the line of civilian government vs. military rule control and eliminate public debate and render trustations anachronistic.
Washington’s streets confirm this story, and they are not an afterthought along the way—they are a lesson in hard questions on the boundaries of federal power, the right application of the military in the nation, and stitching security, law, and democracy together in America.