When a police dispatcher relayed that a man had walked into Howard University Hospital in Washington with a gunshot wound one night this week, it was not just the local police who showed up to investigate. A group of U.S. Border Patrol and other federal agents descended on the brown-brick hospital two miles from the White House, parking their S.U.V.s in front of the main entrance.
A few blocks away, a team of F.B.I. agents was helping to conduct a traffic stop on a Mercedes on the side of a busy street; a few hours later, agents who ordinarily investigate federal weapons violations stood watch as local police officers tried to subdue a disturbed man at a bus stop.
President Trump’s announcement on Monday that the federal government was assuming law enforcement responsibility in the nation’s capital has begun to quietly transform the day-to-day business of policing. Routine calls that might have been handled solely by the Metropolitan Police Department now attract an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as the F.B.I.
In a city where federal law enforcement officials regularly go to work in offices, they are suddenly out on the street, visible almost everywhere — except for those hidden behind the tinted glass of unmarked cars.
Each evening this week, federal agents have rolled out of a vast federal Park Police station south of the Anacostia River to ride through the District until the early morning hours.
Agents have appeared at a range of locations, strolling by bars and restaurants in the trendy U Street Corridor, patrolling a near-empty National Mall after dark and winding through apartment complexes.
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The post Feds Turn Into Beat Cops Under Trump’s D.C. Policing Surge appeared first on New York Times.
