Collision course

The takeover of the Washington D.C. police department and the deployment of National Guard and FBI agents are the next steps in establishing a national police force. Such a police force is essential for the authoritarian consolidation of power and the destruction of local, vibrant democracies. 

Within days of the police taking over, the administration escalated its efforts to consolidate greater control over our capital city.  

This took a form familiar to Detroiters. The appointment of an “emergency manager.” In a short letter, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Washington policies that limit local police from assisting in immigration enforcement and appointed an “emergency police commissioner” who will have “all the powers and duties” of the current police chief. The “emergency commissioner” must now review and approve any directives for the operations of the department.

This is a tactic to destroy the local capacity for direct governance of our most essential collective actions. While Washington D.C. is the target this week, it will not be the last. Cities, with their capacity to provide strong local initiatives, driven by the desires of people to create more just and responsible relationships, are a direct threat to the emergence of authoritarian regimes. Thus, the a need to establish the capacity for military takeovers and the destruction of local governance. Using made-up motives of financial insolvency, crime, immigration, or disasters, emergency managers set aside democratic processes designed to protect people and the places we love.

We are now on a clear collision course between federal powers employed to advance the wealth and privileges of a few and local and state governance. 

While Washington D.C. is a complicated case, the contours of this power grab are clear. In the effort to consolidate power and weaponize the police and military against the people, governance at the local and state levels must be eliminated as a source of power.

Local leaders in DC initially responded cautiously to the takeover. But the D.C. Council named the essence of the federalization for what it is. They said in a statement, “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority.” 

This assault on local democracy intensified with the appointment of Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the emergency police commissioner. The D.C. attorney general, Brian Schwalb, responded forcefully to this action, saying it is “unlawful.” In a legal opinion given to Mayor Muriel Browser, he said plainly, “You are not legally obligated to follow it.” While acknowledging that the 1973 Home Rule Act does “direct the mayor to provide” the president with the services of the local police during an emergency, it does not give the president the power to set aside local policies or to alter the chain of command or determine how the district chooses to pursue local issues.  

The recent imaginative response to redistricting offered by the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is especially important if we understand this moment as an effort to render citizenship meaningless. In a statement intended to assert the power of statewide decision-making, Governor Newsom said:

“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes. In just six months, Trump’s unchecked power has cost Americans billions and taken an ax to the greatest democracy we’ve ever known. This moment calls for urgency and action – that is what we are putting before voters this November, a chance to fight back against his anti-American ways.”

Not only should we welcome this initiative to blunt the efforts of the administration to use illegal redistricting as a tactic to control elections, but we should also note that, as the Governor spoke in Los Angeles, more than a dozen heavily armed Border Patrol agents gathered outside his conference venue. This was an effort to intimidate people. As one agent, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who is leading the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Southern California, said, “We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”

We need to assert our powers in our town halls, municipal governments, state legislatures, and collective gatherings in ways that foster just, socially responsible ways of living. We need to counter the efforts to weaponize police and military personnel to intimidate and silence us. There is no compromise with the drive toward authoritarian power. The only option is to raise our collective voices for more human ways to live. This begins where we are, where we live, protecting the things we love.