This article was originally published in The Guardian
WASHINGTON, DC – Every night as dusk settles in Lincoln Park, the sound of spoons and ladles banging metal pots and pans fills the air for five minutes straight, followed by the chant “we’ll be back.”
This nightly ritual is known as cacerolazos, a form of resistance that dates back to the 1830s, from France to Latin America. Residents all over DC have been participating in it almost every night for nearly a year, starting when Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the city.
“As long as they’re going to be here, I’m going to be here,” said Chris Salm, a resident in the area. “We need to show some resistance to what’s happening to our city.”
Their protests are some of the few in a city that has otherwise become uncomfortably accustomed to the troops in their camouflage fatigues and gun holsters patrolling neighborhoods as part of an executive order, declaring a crime emergency last August. This week, the order was extended through January 2029, when Trump leaves the White House. But many DC residents believe this deployment of federal law enforcement hasn’t helped the city at all, and in fact has made some situations more unsafe, and new research supports their concerns.
“It’s a city under siege,” said Mike Licht, who has been living in his DC neighborhood for 40 years. “I’ve seen some changes, but this is the most disturbing one. Armed troops aimlessly walking our streets, they’ve got nothing to do, they’re bored,” he said.
For months, roughly 2,000-2,500 National Guard troops have been patrolling metro stations, parks, city streets, neighborhoods, and tourist attractions throughout Washington, DC. In July, that number doubled to more than 5,000 troops from more than a dozen states as part of the federal government’s “summer surge” of law enforcement surrounding major events for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration.
DC city officials are pushing for the troops’ withdrawal, but they have limited control because the nation’s capital isn’t a state and the mayor, Muriel Bowser, doesn’t have the authority to call the DC National Guard, only to request them. City officials also don’t have any control over the troop deployments from other states.
”The National Guard is not contributing to law enforcement,” said DC City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson. “The presence of armed soldiers on our streets is unnecessary, hurts potential visitors to the District, creates the wrong impression about safety, and that’s not helpful.”
City councilwoman Janeese Lewis George is the presumptive Democratic nominee for DC Mayor and will likely secure the top spot after November’s general election. She has pledged to work with the federal government and the Trump administration to improve conditions for DC residents.
“Governors across the country have been bullied, bribed, and misled into misusing their National Guard for armed patrols of DC neighborhoods that result in harm to the troops themselves and our community in DC,” Lewis George told the Guardian. “It’s been almost a year, and we must not normalize this.”
While National Guard members do not make arrests themselves, Trump administration officials argue that their efforts are helping reduce crime around the city. The Justice Department reports that the broader D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, comprised of more than 30 federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has made more than 13,900 arrests, removed more than 1,500 illegal firearms, and found 23 missing children since the beginning of the operation last August. The Justice Department said this DC Task Force will continue for three more years.
But new analysis from the nonpartisan think tank Niskanen Center shows that the National Guard deployment has had very little effect on violent crime in DC, despite the steep price tag of about $1.65 million every day for taxpayers nationwide. The report found that the deployment led to a 24% drop in “opportunistic” property crime within the first six months, but the Guard’s presence had no effect on violent crime, which was already declining in recent years.
In fact, it was two National Guard members who came under fire during an ambush-style shooting last November at a DC metro station. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom was killed in the shooting, and Sgt. Andrew Wolfe was seriously injured, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Subheadline – Activists push back against National Guard presence and Trump
For members of the grassroots movement, Free DC, the summer surge of federal troops is an unwanted escalation.
“There is an occupation of our community,” Keya Chatterjee, Executive Director of Free DC, a collective alliance of DC residents resisting Trump policies. “One of the most dangerous things they’ve done is they’ve normalized the presence of the military on our streets…Because it’s not just immigrants under attack, it’s actually everybody that they think they can pick off who they’ve attacked, you know, so whether that’s your trans neighbor or whether that’s your immigrant neighbor.”
During the height of increased federal immigration enforcement in DC last summer, Chatterjee said Free DC volunteers helped direct traffic away from any checkpoints. The activist organization has also been documenting intense and even violent encounters between National Guard troops and residents, posting the videos on social media.
“It is very surreal and isolating, because the rest of the country, the rest of the world, doesn’t
seem to understand that we are 10 months into a military occupation,” she said.
Native Washingtonian Darius Baxter believes the National Guard deployment has been a waste of taxpayer dollars.
“I’ve personally experienced situations working in Southwest [DC] where there’s a shooting, and you see National Guardsmen either running in an opposite direction or not responding to try to bring the situation to a close,” said Baxter, who is the Chief Engagement Officer of GOODProjects DC, a nonprofit focused on supporting DC youth and their families.
Additionally, he believes these troops aren’t patrolling around areas of high crime.
“It’s not uncommon to see the National Guardsmen congregating around the Safeway, sort of dispersing people for loitering versus seeing them position in and around the public housing community, supporting young people that often find themselves in the line of gunfire, particularly in the warmer months of the year,” said Baxter.
He juxtaposes this with his own organization’s approach: deploying people to specific wards with violent crime.
“When [staff are] out there, they have a responsibility to be making points of contact with members of the community, to be identifying individuals that have a high propensity to be the victims or the perpetrators of violent crime and doing what they can to intervene,” said Baxter.
Baxter believes that if federal officials wanted to effectively reduce crime in the city, they would have to address the root causes of it first.
“What we’re seeing is the product of a population of young people that were under-socialized, undereducated, and under-invested in, and those young people become teenagers, and those teenagers become adults, those adults have kids, and that cycle is just repeated time and time and time again,” he said.
Back in Northeast DC, right next to a statue of President Abraham Lincoln, the choir of pots and pans banging together into the summer night continues. Longtime resident Licht said he and his neighbors will keep up their nightly protests until the National Guard leaves the city.
“It’s five minutes of the First Amendment,” he said.
