No Safety Without Self-Determination: Exposing the Myth of Police Protection in D.C.
Washington, D.C.- Trump’s alleged “takeover” of D.C. is a con. It is not about public safety; it is political theater. It is designed to make people think something new is happening when Black and other marginalized D.C. residents know we already live in the most heavily policed city in the United States. Our city, with a population over 700,000, is patrolled by 32 independent police agencies, eight university departments, and five local agencies that have cooperative agreements with the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) under the Police Coordination Act (PCA). These agencies share the same immunity and powers as MPD when patrolling D.C.
This is not new. Federal police have shared arrest powers and street-level joint operations in our neighborhoods with MPD for decades. They are simply emboldened now, shielded by near-total hyper-immunity and excitedly encouraged to be more public with their abuse, more brutal, and omnipresent than ever before. High on power and with a deeper sense of invincibility after watching fellow officers Terence Sutton, convicted of killing Karon Hylton-Brown and covering it up, and Andrew Zabavsky, who helped conceal the crime, pardoned by a President with 34 felonies who told the press “cops will be allowed to do whatever the hell they want". MPD later reinstated both officers.
At the core of D.C.’s systemic violence is a coordinated network of institutions and officials anchored by MPD, the D.C. Police Union, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., the Mayor, and reinforced by certain members of the D.C. Council. Together, they maintain and expand a system that criminalizes, surveils, and controls Black communities. From Mayor Bowser bowing to demands to remove her performative Black Lives Matter mural, and D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto’s draconian “Secure D.C.” and “Peace D.C.” bills, to expanded surveillance hubs, technology, and federal-police joint task forces, they serve as the architects and enforcers of permanent occupation under the guise of public safety.
These departments have a monopoly on violence. They are given the power to use violence with the presumption of legitimacy, while Black people would be caged, beaten, or killed for daring to defend themselves with force. They enforce who is allowed to live and who is allowed to fight back. Police also control their own accountability. Shielded by intentionally dysfunctional systems and police unions, officers avoid accountability while union leaders and the President demand “law and order” for everyone but themselves.
Greg Pemberton, Chair of the D.C. Police Union, has long aligned with far-right politics, as evident in his congressional lobbying, testimony, and appearances on conservative media. He now openly supports the President’s National Guard deployment to D.C. The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel alleges that Pemberton and federal prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens conspired to edit footage from Trump’s 2017 inauguration protests to hide exculpatory evidence and conceal its source, the far-right group Project Veritas. Yet Pemberton is dominating headlines, casting doubt on MPD’s own crime data over alleged number-tampering, despite his own record of manipulating information.
Police manufacture the very conditions they use to justify terrorizing, abusing, and killing people. Through aggressive, systemic practices, they escalate situations, control narratives, and reinforce their authority. Flooding our communities with more cops and soldiers only deepens these conditions across the District.
Encounters are escalated with weapons drawn and force used at the first opportunity, provoking fear or panic, then using that reaction as an excuse for more violence. The systematic dehumanization of unhoused members of our communities lowers the threshold for deadly force because, to the state, their lives do not matter. For fascists, destroying encampments is spoken about like taking out the trash. Police do not create safety in our communities; they perpetuate violence.
This occupation is part of a long continuum, from police training with global occupying forces like the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to the mastery of tactics that treat Black people, especially our youth, as enemy combatants and create clear pathways for military forces to be activated in our communities.
For nearly a decade, we have stood with families grieving loved ones lost to both police and community violence. We have built long-term, non-transactional relationships covering funeral costs, often for children and young people, and standing beside families in their fight for justice and healing. We know that police violence and community violence are interconnected symptoms of the same systems of oppression, and our work confronts both.
We refuse to live in fear. We move in power. Self-determination in safety means rejecting the state’s definition of protection. Policing, surveillance, and militarized occupation are not about keeping us safe; they are about controlling us. We have the right and responsibility to define what safety means in our own communities and to build it ourselves through systems of care, community accountability, and collective defense rooted in our values, not their control. Real safety comes from our people, not the state. We want and deserve safe, healthy, and thriving communities.
We are rooted in the strength of our ancestors, whose blood soaks this land now known as D.C., formerly called Nacotchtank, in the unceded ancestral homelands of the Piscataway people. We are building systems of community safety, care, defense, and liberation outside the state, in our own neighborhoods. We stand in solidarity with all people targeted by these same systems and institutions, and by the same tactics, including migrants kidnapped, trafficked, and caged by ICE in our city. We must, we can, and we will.
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*BLM DC is not part of the national BLM organization. More at www.blmchapterstatement.com.
