Civil rights and legal services community unite to stop policing by National Guard in D.C.

WASHINGTON — A coalition of D.C.-based civil rights and legal service organizations yesterday filed an amicus brief in support of the District of Columbia’s lawsuit challenging the President’s unilateral decision to deploy the National Guard to conduct law enforcement in the District.

The District’s public interest community has united in opposition to the National Guard’s law enforcement activities in the nation’s capital. The amicus brief was filed by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia (ACLU-D.C.), on behalf of themselves and: Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, Bread for the City, Children’s Law Center, DC Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, Disability Rights DC at University Legal Services, Legal Aid DC, School Justice Project, Tzedek DC, and Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

“We are calling for an immediate and decisive end to the National Guard’s law enforcement role in DC,” said Madeleine Gates, Associate Counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “D.C. residents have fought hard for the right to self-governance. Putting core local powers like policing in the hands of state militias infringes on residents’ dignity and makes our community less safe.”

The coalition asserts that the troops are “locally unaccountable and not trained for domestic law enforcement” to police the streets of D.C. neighborhoods on the thin pretext of an “emergency.”

"President Trump’s militarization of the District in order to micromanage local affairs is an affront to all D.C. residents," said Scott Michelman, Legal Director at ACLU-D.C. "An influx of military troops who are unfamiliar with our streets and unaccountable to our communities makes D.C. less safe, not more. The people of D.C. deserve local control over the officials who police our streets."

The brief states: “The President’s use of the military to further his apparent desire to ‘take [the District] back,’ ‘take it away from the Mayor,’ and ‘run it the way it’s supposed to be run’ defies any notion of democratic representation and flies in the face of the more than 200-year old fight by District residents to achieve Home Rule.”

Historians remind us that the District’s struggle for self-governance is intrinsically intertwined with racial justice and civil rights. The brief contends that “[t]he fight for greater control over DC police was part and parcel of District residents’ fight for democratic control.”

Modern policing, the coalition argues, recognizes that order cannot be imposed externally on communities. The briefing concludes that “[i]t should be for District residents, who experience both the fluctuations in crime and the excesses of the police, to determine how to keep our community safe.”

See the amicus brief here.
Read the complaint here.