A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Alright. For a take on President Trump's takeover of the D.C. police, we've got D.C. City Council member Brooke Pinto with us. Councilmember Pinto represents Ward 2. She's also chairperson of the committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, which is responsible for public safety issues including law enforcement, law enforcement oversight and also violence reduction in the city. Councilmember, your first thoughts. President Trump just announced this a few minutes ago.
BROOKE PINTO: Well, good morning, A, and thanks for having me. I mean, the press conference is still going on, and so details are still unfolding. What I continue to believe is that every person in Washington, D.C., has the right to be safe. That's true for our over 700,000 residents who have lived here all their lives. That's true if you're interning on Capitol Hill for the summer or if you're a tourist visiting from anywhere in the world, and nothing is more important to me and my colleagues in our local government than keeping everyone safe in Washington, D.C. And that's the hard work of government that we do every single day. And it's why, in 2023, when there was a crime spike, we came together, and I introduced the largest legislative package in our city's history called Secure DC that had 100 different interventions that have driven crime down to the lowest levels we've had in 30 years.
MARTÍNEZ: The federal government taking over D.C.'s - what do you think this does to those things? Like the Secure DC bill you mentioned, also Peace DC, which you just tried to introduce back in March.
PINTO: Yes. Peace DC we did successfully pass. That was my other bill this year. But, you know, our law enforcement, our metropolitan police department, is our local police department, and they should report to our chief of police and to our locally elected mayor. And so the president's statements this morning that he's going to federalize MPD for a period of 30 days doesn't make sense from an operational perspective. These are local laws that our police are enforcing, and we have done a lot of work over the last several years to build up trust in the police department with our communities. They understand our neighborhoods. They understand when there are crews rivaling one another, and that context is very important. These are not federal incidents to be overseen by...
MARTÍNEZ: Right.
PINTO: ...The federal government.
MARTÍNEZ: What's your understanding about what the National Guard would be allowed to do? Would they be allowed to arrest people in D.C.?
PINTO: So the deployment of the National Guard is even more unusual because the president is saying he's going to have hundreds of national guardsmen roaming through the streets in D.C. in the coming days and weeks. Now, we are used to having some federal entities here in the nation's capital because we have national security events all the time. It's something that we're very accustomed to. We work with our federal law enforcement partners all the time. But national guards are usually doing things like disaster relief and helping kind of maintain order in the streets. They're not really fighting crime. And so, you know, they're not in the best position to actually handle these arrests and prosecutions the way that our local police is.
MARTÍNEZ: Does D.C. need help at all with crime, or is this something that you completely do not want in any way?
PINTO: Oh, there are absolutely ways that our partnership with the federal government can help us in solving crime. We have judicial vacancies that the Senate is responsible for confirming judges on our local courts that have sat vacant for years. We have a declamation rate at the U.S. attorney's office that is still too high. We need the federal government to step up their support with their supervision agencies, and we need Congress to fix the $1 billion gap they left in our local budget so we can pay our police and firefighters. So we welcome their help in those regards that are actually going to help us fight crime.
MARTÍNEZ: That is D.C. City Council member Brooke Pinto. Councilmember, thank you very much.
PINTO: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
