North Dakota – As President Trump takes federal action to fight crime in Washington D.C., North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer on Friday said he “would support some version of that” with a focus on law enforcement for starters.
“Maybe law and order is the first area that we should look at it but I don’t know if it’s the only one,” Cramer said on The Flag last week ahead of Trump’s Monday news conference at the White House.
Listen: North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer on The Flag
During that news conference, Trump announced the city’s Metropolitan Police Department would now fall under federal control, and the National Guard would also be deployed.
On social media on Sunday, Trump, who suggest crime is out of control in the nation’s capital, wrote in part that “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR. I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN!”
Despite calling the mayor of D.C. “a good person”, Trump also claimed that “Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive.”
“Who really believes that the federal government is good at running anything, much less a city,” said Cramer. “That said, it’s amazing how much better the federal government would be at it than the District of Columbia itself.”
Despite calls from residents over the years to make D.C. into an actual state, Cramer says the nation’s founders “created D.C. to not be a city or a state on purpose because it’s supposed to be the federal capital.”
“You don’t really have a community, so to speak,” said Cramer. “You have a federal capital and I do think that more of it should be under the federal government.”
Cramer suggests the city’s law enforcement agencies need to work more “cooperatively.”
“U.S. Capitol Police, which is a several hundred member force, has to work cooperatively with city police,” said Cramer. “You have a hodgepodge and it’s not very well managed and efficient.”
“So maybe at the very least for security purposes we could take at least that [law enforcement] part of it and put it under federal jurisdiction.”
