WASHINGTON, D.C., June 2, 2020 — If you’ve lived in D.C. long enough, you’re probably aware of the alphabet soup of police agencies that operate within city limits. From the better-known Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Park Police to the lesser-known Bureau of Engraving and Printing Police and Smithsonian Police, if there’s a government agency or institution of any size or consequence, it probably has its own cops.
Much of that police power is federally controlled, and there’s growing evidence that it’s being deployed to help quell what has been four days of peaceful and destructive protests alike against police violence.
While the Secret Service, Park Police, and D.C. National Guard have taken the lead in fending off protesters in Lafayette Park over the last four days, additional agencies including the DEA, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and Customs and Border Patrol are adding law enforcement personnel across the city ahead of protests this week.
And that seems to be coming at the behest of President Trump himself, who on Monday called for a much more muscular response to protests across the country.
“In D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before,” said Trump during a phone call with governors. “Washington was under very good control, but we are going to have it under much more control. We are going to pull in thousands of people.”
Whether it’s a wise decision is certainly in dispute, but what’s not in dispute is his broad legal authority to do so in the nation’s capital. And that starts with the D.C. National Guard.
“Unlike state guards, where there’s often a complicated interplay between the governor and the president, the D.C. Guard has a unified command,” says University of Texas Law professor Stephen Vladeck. “The mayor can ask, but the president and secretary of defense are the only authorities who can formally activate the Guard. So the D.C. Guard is basically ‘always federal’ in ways that aren’t necessarily true for states’ guards.”
There are also reports that military police from Fort Bragg in North Carolina have been deployed to D.C. Now, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits active-duty military from assisting in domestic law enforcement activities, with only a few exceptions. This work usually falls to the National Guard. If the president were to bring in troops from neighboring active duty bases, they would need an exemption to the act — and one exemption is the Insurrection Act. See full story at https://dcist.com/story/20/06/01/district-of-cops-feds-dc-national-guard-police-power/
