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Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is out of town Thursday after traveling to Martha’s Vineyard for a family matter, Fox News has learned.
The Democrat was not in the District Thursday, and a source confirmed she traveled north to the Massachusetts island vacation hot spot.
The mayor was traveling for a “family commitment,” according to her office. She’s expected back in the city Friday.
“The mayor has a family commitment and had to pick up her daughter,” the mayor’s office said when asked about her trip to Martha’s Vineyard. “She will return to the District tomorrow.”
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Bowser made the trip to the Massachusetts island after President Donald Trump federalized the city’s police department Monday after a spate of high-profile crimes.
Trump announced Monday morning during a packed press conference that he was federalizing the Metropolitan Police Department under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which allows the president to assume emergency control of the capital’s police force for 30 days.
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“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said. “And we’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to take it.”
Hundreds of National Guard troops have since converged on the nation’s capital, and the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Capitol Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are assisting with Trump’s law and order crackdown and sweeps of the city.
Since the 2020 crime wave, the nation’s capital has been rocked by shootings that have left innocent children dead, a trend of juveniles committing carjackings that have turned deadly in some cases; and shoplifting crimes and attacks on government employees, summer interns and others, including the fatal shooting of 21-year-old congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym in June.
Democratic lawmakers and local leaders have slammed Trump over the move, arguing crime has fallen in recent years after the wildly violent crime trends of 2020 that rocked cities nationwide.
Though crimes have trended downward in recent years after the heavy crime of 2020, the lethality of crimes in D.C. has spiked dramatically, meaning the chances of being victimized in the city have dropped, but the chances of dying as a victim of violent crime have increased.
The Council on Criminal Justice published a study in July examining violent crime data from 17 large U.S. cities between 2018 and 2024, specifically diving into the lethality of violent crimes in those cities. It found Washington, D.C., had the highest lethality level of the group, which included cities such as Baltimore and Chicago, at a 38% increase in lethality in 2024 compared with 2018.
Lethality in D.C. jumped 341% when compared to 2012 data, the study found, reporting there were 13 homicides per 1,000 serious violent crimes in 2012 and 57 homicides per 1,000 serious violent crimes in 2024.
Bowser slammed the federalization of the city during a townhall meeting Tuesday.
“This is a time where community needs to jump in,” Bowser said during the meeting community leaders, which was livestreamed on X. “We all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push.”
She called Trump’s effort “an intrusion on our autonomy.”
When Trump first federalized the city, Bowser called the move “unprecedented” but added that she wasn’t “totally surprised.”
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