What happens when the president of the United States exerts police authority over a city?

I'm Scott Ott with Bill Whittle and Stephen Green.

This episode of Right Angles brought to you by the members at bill whittle.com.

And gentlemen, I got to say, as a conservative and a constitutionalist, when I first started hearing

that the Trump administration was basically usurping some of the police authority of Washington, D.C., the city, that got my backup a little bit, and I thought, what in the world is going on here? How can we justify this?

Stephen Green, I early on noticed something, though.

The claim kept being made that Washington, D.C.,'s crime rate has been on the decline and is perhaps at a 30-year low.

So the Trump administration's argument that it needed to step in because of an emergency,

and it acted under emergency powers in order to, how do I say this,

to undercut the home rule charter that was established in 1973 for Washington, D.C.

Those emergency powers were unnecessary because D.C. is in a decline as far as crime rate goes.

But Steve, I did just a cursory little query on one of the AI agent search engines and saw that while they may

be on a decline in general, it's not a low crime city. And it is the seat of the federal government.

It is one of the higher crime rate cities in the country, including violent crimes.

Steve, do you think the president is justified in exercising these still contested powers to the latest that we've heard before we record this is the Attorney General was basically replacing the police chief of D.C.

by putting the drug enforcement agency's head over the police chief.

Is the president justified in this emergency powers action, or is that just political posturing?

Well, before I get to that, let me tell you a little bit about the crime situation in D.C. Everybody who I know that lives in D.C., well, I tend to know them virtually

via Twitter, is just scared to death of their own city, and it doesn't really matter where they

live anymore. It's not the bad part of town. It's just the town. And the police chief got caught lying about the crime stats in the last couple of years. A woman who tried to whistleblow just settled out of court with the police department, I believe it was, for finding all these crimes that weren't being reported. So whatever the statistics are,

they're lies. That's just, that's what they are. They're absolute lies. But even if they're

right, Steve, you still have a pretty high crime city.

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