D.C. Council member wants National Guard to contain the city’s crime ‘cancer’

A D.C. Council member said Tuesday that the mayor of the nation’s capital needs to join him in calling out the D.C. National Guard to regain control of streets overrun by violent crime.

Ward 8 representative and Democrat Trayon White made his case for a military deployment during an impassioned press conference Tuesday — just feet away from where three people were gunned down over the weekend near the corner of 16 Street and Good Hope Road in Southeast.

Mr. White said crime in his ward east of the Anacostia River has become a “cancer” that’s spreading to other parts of the city.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Mr. White said. “We have young men wandering through the community with AK-47s, letting off 60, 90, up to 100 rounds — daily.”

The council member said he reached out to Mayor Muriel Bowser to discuss his proposed call-up of the National Guard, a deployment that would require coordination with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and the White House, since the president has authority over the local guard units.

The District has seen 13 slayings in just the first nine days of August. The 161 homicides recorded so far this year represent a 28% increase from 2022, and violent crime is up 37%, with sexual assaults, robberies, assaults with a dangerous weapon and carjackings all seeing year-over-year increases.

Mr. White, 39, said he is looking to take his concerns directly to the White House, though he didn’t offer a timeline for when that would happen. Ms. Bowser is also on vacation this week.

The council member said he is seeking an armed, uniformed presence that is visible throughout the District.

He likened it to when roughly two dozen National Guardsmen were actively deployed in the city beginning in 1990.

The guardsmen largely provided technical assistance to both police and citizens at the time — for instance, they would repair police vehicles, and they would also provide lights for the community anti-crime patrols known as the “Orange Hats.”

In 1993, former D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly requested that President Bill Clinton allow the mayor to call in a more robust National Guard deployment over the District’s crime woes. Mr. Clinton ultimately rejected the request.

“The District regularly requests the support of the DC National Guard where our needs are within their mission,” a representative of the Bowser administration said in a statement to The Washington Times. “We will continue to make these requests as appropriate while also being mindful of the staffing constraints of the DCNG. Our focus, and where we will continue to request Council support, is on attracting and retaining more officers at the Metropolitan Police Department and ensuring they have the resources and policy environment to do their jobs, have a strong presence in our neighborhoods, and make arrests and close cases.”

When the city surpassed 100 homicides in June, it was the fastest the District had reached that threshold in 20 years. The nation’s capital is on track to exceed 200 homicides for the third straight year — another milestone not witnessed in two decades.

Juvenile suspects are increasingly involved in the dangerous crimes, particularly carjackings, as judicial consequences are seldom delivered to the underage offenders.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the federal prosecutors who handle the city’s most serious offenses, have also come under fire for declining to prosecute two-thirds of the cases that have been sent to them by D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.

The loved ones of those killed in Saturday night’s shooting gave the District’s grim crime statistics a face during the press conference.

Tempie Satcher, the mother of 35-year-old Bernard “BJ” Hodges, who was slain during the gunfire along with Tymea Cook, 27, and Reginald Gilbert, 34, was on hand as Mr. White made his remarks.

Her son was a father of four who held three jobs to support his family — one as an HVAC technician, one in the boiler room at MGM Casino and another for a water company, Ms. Satcher said. She said he had just dropped off his kids when he shot.

D.C. police still have no leads on any suspects or persons of interest in the shooting. The dead ends in the police investigation were a source of frustration among some family members.

“We need to stop being afraid of saying we are snitching,” Ms. Satcher said. “We need to bury that word — there’s no such thing as snitching when you’re trying to protect your community, when you’re trying to protect your mothers, your children, all of the ancestors before us. Stop it young black men.”

Ms. Satcher also called the shooters cowardly, which was a point that was echoed and amplified by Geraldine Jackson, Mr. Gilbert’s aunt.

Ms. Jackson said the perpetrators who use guns to solve their problems are “punks,” and they’re contributing to senseless violence by indiscriminately harming everyone with their gunfire.

“I remember one time growing up they would say ‘No kids and no females,’” Ms. Jackson said about the District’s surge of gang and drug-related violence of the 1980s and 90s.

She then directed a message to parents: “Get your kids because these are the people who’re doing all this violence.”

Mr. White made clear that the National Guard is not the long-term solution to the District’s crime problems, no more than hiring more police is.

He argued jobs programs and housing are needed on the material side, along with creating stronger ties in the community and encouraging more active parenting at home.

Mr. White, who was elected to the council in 2017, said he believes more social services are needed to address the despair underlying the sense of lawlessness.

The two-term council member is perhaps best known outside his ward for his 2018 comments about European Jewish financiers controlling the weather and the federal government. He’s since apologized, but has also been a supporter of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

“While we’re in a homeless crisis and a crime crisis, we’re in a hopelessness crisis right here, and we got to call it what it is,” Mr. White said Tuesday.  

The District is one of the few major cities that continues to struggle with deadly violence following the nationwide spike in crime that began in 2020.

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Houston have all seen improvements in their year-over-year homicide rate, according to research firm AH Datalytics. Even last year’s murder capital — New Orleans — has seen killings plummet by over 20%.

The District joins Memphis, Dallas, Kansas City and Cleveland as some of the large cities whose homicide rates have worsened in 2023.