The Washington Post interviewed more than 30 people who live or work where shootings and homicides are highest. Their views on Trump’s policing solution are mixed.
The friends in Southeast Washington were gathered on the steps of their apartment complex enjoying the summer night when police swarmed.
At about midnight, more than 20 officers – representing DC police and at least three federal agencies – surrounded the Black teenagers and young men outside.
There were no blaring sirens or flashing lights, said Vincent Tyree, a 33-year-old father who lives in the neighbourhood and witnessed the scene. The officers did not say why they were there, Tyree said, but pointed torches and began asking questions. Some people pulled out their phones and hit record.
Their video of the August incident at the Renaissance Homes apartment complex – which showed one person handcuffed then released without explanation, one officer pulling his gun, and another swatting a phone away – went viral as an early indicator of police tactics in the first few days of President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
It is not uncommon for DC police to patrol this neighbourhood at Congress St and Wheeler Rd SE, known to residents as 10th Place, an area with one of the city’s highest rates of gun violence this year.
But to Tyree, the response that night felt unwarranted.
“You see the police, you’re supposed to feel a warm embrace because you know they are protecting the community,” said the mentor with the anti-violence nonprofit Guns Down Friday. “Now, you got these guys pulling up. You scaring people.”
It has been two weeks since Trump declared a crime emergency in DC, saying the city was in “a situation of complete and total lawlessness” and deploying hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard members onto the streets. In response, DC officials pointed to data that shows violent crime across the District has reached a 30-year-low, sharply declining since 2023, when the city experienced a generational spike in killings.
But neither the President’s dystopian portrait of the city nor statistics that show falling crime capture the daily reality for those most exposed to gun violence.
The Washington Post interviewed more than 30 people who live or work in DC neighbourhoods that experience the greatest share of shootings and homicides. While many residents are eager for help making their communities safer, their views on the President’s policing solution are mixed.
They want Government to invest in other ways, too: more after-school activities, better-paying jobs and drug treatment programmes for young people.
Law enforcement is part of the answer, they said, but only if officers’ actions are just, an ongoing battle in a city where many residents are distrustful of police. One woman called the crackdown’s early days “a blessing,” while others expressed fear over what they called overly aggressive tactics.
Many said they are sceptical that an increased presence of federal officers, the bulk of whom are strangers to their communities, will make them safer.
The video of the incident at Renaissance Homes, which occurred overnight August 13 into August 14, captures 16-year-old Maciah King-Brooks peeking outside his ground-floor apartment window. He heard yelling and paused making ramen to investigate, he later said, watching as an officer pointed his gun at a neighbour’s upstairs balcony. Scared, the teen stayed inside.
Outside, the video shows, the friends reminded one another to “calm down,” like they had been taught in de-escalation trainings. Another yelled at the officers: “Y’all don’t even care about the Black community.”
By the time the police left, it still wasn’t clear why they had come, said residents who spoke to The Post. Some said they may have heard a distant gunshot, but others said they hadn’t heard anything. The end of the video shows officers escorting a man from inside one of the apartment buildings in handcuffs.
When asked in numerous inquiries why officers were at the apartments, spokespeople for the DC and federal police agencies present did not give a reason. In a statement, the White House derided DC leaders, praised Trump and sent links to videos from the administration’s X account of people supportive of the President.
“DC leaders have failed residents and visitors of the city for years. Their action – and inaction – to address violent crime has failed time and time again,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “President Trump’s bold actions to stop violent crime in DC have already yielded tremendous results getting illegal guns and drugs off the streets, and arresting criminals for assaults, DUIs, and more. DC residents and visitors have expressed support for the President’s move to clean up the streets.”
King-Brooks said he feels like the President and the officers acting on his commands are stereotyping Black teenagers like him as “hoodlums, gangsters, militias, felons, drug addicts”. But King-Brooks said he is hardworking, extroverted and humble, with plans to go to college to study mechanical engineering.
“I’m still a person in the neighbourhood where they’re giving out the stereotype,” he said. “Yet, I’m not affiliated with what they’re stereotyping us to be.”
A pastor ponders in Northeast
As he went on a run in Kenilworth Park in Northeast last week, pastor Delonte Gholston thought about the message he would deliver in his Sunday sermon at Peace Fellowship Church in Deanwood.
His congregation mostly includes people who live in neighbourhoods that stretch from the National Arboretum to the Maryland border, where data shows there have been 24 homicides and nearly 60 shootings this year.
As a native Washingtonian, he said, he felt like some expected him to preach about how crime is down or express outrage over federal officers in the street. But his feelings were more complicated.
He knew some people who would be in the pews had their lives changed by violence: a mum whose son was killed three years ago. The little brother still grieving. A woman whose niece was fatally shot in 2023.
Gholston and other community leaders who have spent years advocating for policing reform worry that the influx of unfamiliar federal officers will undo the tenuous progress they made repairing broken trust between residents and local police.
There is a role for police in addressing community violence, he said, but “you don’t do it this way”.
Some see Trump’s language as harking back to the 1990s – when Black communities felt targeted by forceful policing, lengthy prison sentences that fuelled mass incarceration, and phrases such as “super predator” to describe children who commit crimes.
“You can’t build trust in a community that you are trying to occupy,” he said.
That tension – between needing the police for safety while fearing that officers might cause harm – is what Darcell Jamison grappled with as she drove her four children toward their home in Northeast Washington earlier this month.
She grew up in Southeast Washington, and she said she has run from gunfire and seen dead bodies. Just maybe, she said she thought, more police could be a good thing. As long as they weren’t “so aggressive”.
Since before Trump’s executive order, Kiki Fox has been calling on DC officials to invest in the safety of her Kingman Park community.
Earlier this summer, she said, she had just dropped her son off at elementary school when gunfire erupted, sending her back inside while carrying her 3-year-old daughter to shelter in place. Bullets went through her neighbour’s wall during a shooting that left about 100 casings outside a nearby apartment complex. In 2023, Fox said, she and her husband were carjacked at gunpoint by two teens as their young children slept in the back seat of their Subaru. This year, police data shows there have been six homicides and 10 shootings near her home.
In July, she emailed Lindsey Appiah, the District’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice, asking for more DC police and a meeting with city, police and community leaders. The city responded quickly, Fox said, organising a recent community walk with local police where she watched neighbourhood kids run up to a city police sergeant and remind him they had “smoked” him in a basketball game – a sign to Fox that they were making progress together.
But she said she doesn’t agree with the President’s decision to send federal officers and National Guard troops on to city streets.
“It actually makes me feel less safe because it is taking away DC’s ability to govern itself and to work with its citizens,” said Fox, 38. “I would rather invest in programs that are going to help the community, as opposed to spending a ton of money to just have people with guns parade around and make people afraid to go outside.”
In Northwest, teens ‘on edge’
Inside a historic building along the U Street Corridor, Tia Bell, founder of the nonprofit Trigger Project, looked out at the young people sitting before her and gave explicit instructions: “Do not run.”
Bell turned what she planned as a brainstorm for a gun violence prevention campaign into a lesson on dealing with their new reality.
Before making any sudden movements near police, she told the teens, close your eyes and breathe. If you are detained, she said, “repeatedly ask for your lawyer. Y’all have a lawyer.”
Across the city, community advocates held similar sessions or shared information sheets to help people – especially young people and immigrants – know their rights.
Police data shows there have been 10 shootings and three gun deaths in 2025 in this neighbourhood, where the attempted carjacking of a former US Doge Service staffer spurred the President’s ordered crackdown.
The U Street area, a nightlife hub with a juvenile curfew, has been a police focus.
During Bell’s session, some young people said they were staying home as much as possible to avoid police. One 20-year-old said she felt “on edge,” and an 18-year-old said he felt “hyperaware”.
Mike Adjanla, 17, said he wished the Government would spend more on initiatives such as the city’s Safe Passage programme, which issues grants to community organisations that place adult safety guards along routes children take to school.
Then Bell asked them about their “exposure levels” to gun violence, using their colour scale.
“Orange or red,” said Philip Abatan, 18, who said he saw a shooting last summer after a football scrimmage at Roosevelt High School in Northwest.
Abatan, who lives in Southeast, is starting college this week at Towson University in Maryland, where he will study business administration and play football. He is ready to move away.
“It’s made me feel more inhuman,” he said of the increased police presence. “I feel like [DC] is just not the place for me to be at.”
He said he hopes Trump doesn’t deploy federal officers to Baltimore next.
A community conflicted in Southeast
Levon “Big Syke” Williams got a call from a worried mother the day after Trump federalised DC police, saying her 16-year-old son had just been handcuffed by federal officers. Could Williams help?
The 38-year-old violence interrupter rushed to 13th St SE in Congress Park, where there have been five homicides this year.
“Hey, how you doing? I’m a violence interrupter for the Ward 8 community,” he recalled saying to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives officer. “Is it all right if I ask you what is he being placed in handcuffs for?”
On a normal night, Williams said, DC police would have recognised him as part of what is commonly known as “community violence intervention,” a Government-funded, non-law-enforcement effort that typically taps ex-offenders to de-escalate neighbourhood conflicts.
But the federal officer, he said, ignored him. Police told the mother that they had smelled “burnt marijuana” in the air, Williams said, and eventually they released the teen.
Williams, born and raised in the District, said he believes the best people to steer others away from crime are those who have been part of the system. He spent years incarcerated in the juvenile and adult systems, he said, and lost friends and relatives to gun violence.
This is why he decided to become a violence interrupter in Ward 8, where so far this year nearly four in 10 of the District’s 101 homicides and more than a third of the city’s 330 shootings have occurred, data shows.
But, Williams said, crime statistics tell only one part of the story of this community – the kind of place where neighbours say they grew up together and keep each other safe.
Where on a stoop on Congress St SE, neighbours – one of whom had been shot twice before, and another who had lost her 17-year-old son to gun violence – debated whether more police would lower crime. Where in Fort Dupont Park, thousands gathered to celebrate the godfather of go-go music, Chuck Brown.
Where, on Friday night at Renaissance Homes, a group of young men, teens and boys launched an impromptu push-up contest in the parking lot.
They were there for a “Know Your Rights” training with organisers from the anti-violence nonprofit Guns Down Friday, who had grown nervous over the police presence there. Residents said teams of officers had come back most nights since Trump’s executive order, including on August 20.
Again, residents recorded – videos that show a DC police officer shoving a man to the ground, a federal agent swearing at them while carrying a M4-type rifle, and several officers climbing into an unmarked car with an illuminated neon sign that said “Lyft” and “Uber”.
As night fell, organisers led those gathered for the training in a recitation of what to say to police:
“Am I free to go?”
“What are you stopping me for?”
“I do not consent to a search.”
Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Salim Adofo joined the training after hearing confusion from residents over Trump’s crime-fighting strategy. They want to feel safe, he said, and “sometimes the default is police”.
“When you actually sit and talk to them, they really just want more resources,” Adofo said, listing off investments such as reliable trash pickup, quality housing, equitably-funded schools and more grocery stores.
As the training wrapped, Williams and DC advocate Tony Lewis Jr. left a message for residents, planting red signs in the ground that read “DON’T GET TAKEN”.
It was a slogan that Lewis came up with in 2001 when speaking to a group of fathers during an anti-incarceration campaign. Back then, he said, it was meant to encourage them to stay out of trouble for the sake of their children.
Now, he said, it was a reminder to stay vigilant around police.
“In this moment,” Lewis said, “it’s even more applicable.”