The sights and sounds of Capitol Hill are usually predictable: handsome Second Empire rowhomes and stately Georgian grace alongside adjoining monumental works such as Paul Cret’s Folger Shakespeare Library and Cass Gilbert’s Supreme Court Building in serene splendor. But recently, the tranquility of the neighborhood has been disrupted by an increasingly common sight: a roving band of activists, as youthful as an AARP convention, banging pots and pans within earshot of small children in local parks.
One might ask what cause would compel these denizens to forgo an early-bird special in order to agitate in the streets. Well, their cause du jour is to “Free DC.” Free it from what, exactly? From oppressive tax burdens, some of the highest in the nation? From the reasonable fear that arises when severe drug addicts and masked criminals are allowed to wander the streets with careless abandon? Or from the indignity of sidewalks covered in filth?
Sadly, the answer is no, no, and no. These activists, and the broader “Free DC” movement, whose signage now proliferates across Capitol Hill and other upper-middle class neighborhoods alongside the familiar “In this house, we believe…” signs, cast themselves as freedom fighters against the mere presence of the National Guard in the District. Of course, if ignorance were bliss, they would be the happiest people alive, given their apparent failure to grasp that the Trump Administration would not have had to take extraordinary measures like calling in the National Guard if the D.C. government, long a hotbed of graft and organized incompetence, had fulfilled its most basic obligation: maintaining order in the nation’s capital.
Case in point, even with the Guard’s presence, youth-driven violence has become a serious blight on the city’s social life, driven in no small part by the District’s feckless accommodation of teenage hooliganism. This is especially evident in the Navy Yard neighborhood, on the other side of the Capitol from the “Free DC” activists and their seven-figure homes.
Last weekend, instead of imposing order through a citywide curfew, local authorities opted to host a taxpayer-funded late-night event, apparently acting on the theory that school-age children have a right to be out past 10 p.m. The result of concentrating rather than confronting the problem was entirely predictable: property damage, street brawls, and residents left feeling like prisoners in their own neighborhood.
Sadly, the District’s impetus to tackle disorder with kid gloves (no pun intended) is far too predictable, with data backing it up. In the years preceding President Trump’s August 2025 declaration of a crime emergency in the District, local headlines were dominated by troubling indicators: a homicide rate reaching its highest level in nearly three decades, 274 reported in 2023, and a threefold increase in juvenile carjackings between April 2023 and April 2024, among other unsettling statistics.
While crime began to decline in 2024, much of that progress occurred in spite of, rather than because of, the District government. Consider, for instance, the case of WMATA or “Metro,” the region’s public transit provider, an interstate compact between D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, not a municipal agency, which only began seriously addressing fare evasion in 2022 after it had increased tenfold (3 percent to 34 percent) over the preceding six years. (The District’s preferred method to this discrepancy, much like the teen takeovers was to simply give into lawbreakers by doing away with bus fare altogether.)
As criminologists such as James Q. Wilson, author of the celebrated “Broken Windows” theory that helped saved New York City from the abyss during the Giuliani years noted, the best way to deter violent crimes such as homicide, armed robbery or aggravated assault is to go after comparatively minuscule, yet still profoundly anti-social transgressions such as fare evasion because after all, if a person doesn’t value a human life then certainly they do not care about paying a measly $2.35. Despite prosecuting evaders being a proven and effective way of getting repeat offenders off the streets, the D.C. Council in its infinite wisdom decided to decriminalize fare evasion back in 2019, because it is, you guessed it: “racist.”
Metro’s efforts at the time were bifurcated by the D.C. Council’s 2022 revision of the Criminal Code which included repealing mandatory minimums for all crimes except first-degree murder, a proposition so ludicrous that even then-President Biden signed on to its nullification through H.J. Res. 26. Of course, if he had prioritized fighting crime in the District, he could have replaced his U.S. Attorney, Matthew Graves, under whose tenure a significant share of cases, reportedly as high as 67 percent, were declined for prosecution.
If the theory of James Q. Wilson is correct, and recent experience suggests that it is, then the presence of the National Guard in the District is not an aberration but a confirmation. Order, once visibly restored, has a way of sustaining itself. The results speak for themselves: the District entered 2026 with three consecutive weeks without a homicide, an extraordinary milestone, while homicides fell sharply and overall violent crime declined in tandem. Deterrence, it turns out, still works.
Yet even its defenders should recognize that the Guard is not a permanent solution. It is, at best, a stabilizing force, capable of restoring order, but not of sustaining it indefinitely. The deeper question, then, is not whether such interventions are effective, but why they have been necessary at all.
Here, the advocates of “Free D.C.” inadvertently raise a more serious issue than they intend. For more than half a century, Congress has granted the District a significant degree of autonomy under “Home Rule” than the Framers of the Constitution initially intended. And yet, at critical junctures, federal intervention has proven indispensable, from rescue from fiscal insolvency in the 1990s, after years of mismanagement and profligacy under Marion Barry, to the present restoration of basic public order after years of local abdication. The pattern is difficult to ignore.
If Washington is to be not only governed, but governed well, “safe and beautiful” according to the administration’s rhetoric, then it may be necessary to revisit the assumptions underlying Home Rule itself. Other great capitals have recognized this. In Paris, for example, national authorities maintain a visible and continuous presence in the urban core through security forces such as the National Gendarmerie, ensuring that the seat of government remains secure and orderly as a matter of national priority.
The United States should think no less seriously about its own capital. Washington is not merely a local jurisdiction; it is a national symbol for all Americans from Peoria, Illinois, to Peoria, Arizona. Its condition reflects not only on its residents, but on the country as a whole. To insist on this is not to deny the claims of local self-government, but to recognize that they are not absolute in the grand scheme of things.
The question, ultimately, is not whether the federal government should have a role in the District. It already does, always has, and always will. The question is whether it is willing to exercise that responsibility with the clarity and seriousness the moment demands. A capital worthy of a great nation does not emerge by accident. It is built, maintained, and when necessary restored, regardless of what bored activists without a clue of what transpires in the city they claim to care about say otherwise.
