The White House has confirmed the temporary chain of command for the District of Columbia police force over the next month, placing the ultimate authority for the department with President Donald Trump.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday told reporters that the Trump administration plans to “work with” the department’s exiting command structure after Trump invoked a never-before-used authority in the city’s home rule charter to take control of the police department, but she reiterated the new lines of responsibility that end in the Oval Office.
“Ultimately, the chain of command is as such: The President of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States, [and] our DEA administrator, Terry Cole, who is now serving ahead of the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department,” she said.
Cole, who Trump announced as the acting head of the department at a press conference on Monday, has temporarily replaced D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser as the person to whom MPD Chief Pamela Smith reports.
The president justified the unprecedented move as necessary because of what he described — inaccurately — as record crime levels akin to some of the world’s most violent cities — even as the American capital has seen declines in murder and other violent crime for the past two years.
The previously unused section of the 1973 D.C. Home Rule Act Trump invoked in an executive order allows the president to use the Washington police department for federal purposes for a 30-day period.
It was intended for use during periods of civil unrest like the riots that gripped the city and left parts of it burnt out and in ruins after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but in practice there is no constraint on the president’s ability to make use of the law so long as he “determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes.”
Although Washington’s murder rate hit levels not seen since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s just two years ago, the period since has seen a steep decline under Smith, who was named to her role in 2023 after two years leading the U.S. Park Police.
Statistics made public by the DC government and the Department of Justice show other violent crimes having declined during the same period. Yet Trump, whose view of Washington is largely limited to what he sees from his armored limousine while riding to and from the golf course he owns in Sterling, Virginia, described the situation in the capital as “complete and total lawlessness.”
He also blamed the “dire public safety crisis” on “the abject failures of the city’s local leadership,” including the city’s elected city council’s decision to abolish cash bail as part of efforts to reduce racial inequities in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer.
