Washington, DC is a pretty unique place.

Obviously there’s the museums and historic monuments — as well as the inelegant government concrete boulders that house the alphabet soup of bureaucratic entities.

But DC is more than just a showroom.

The city itself occupies more than 60 square miles of land — for reference, Lock Haven reaches just more than 2 square miles. A closer, though still hilariously not to scale, comparison is Williamsport, which occupies about 9.5 square miles.

Within that acreage, DC houses a population of 689,545, as of the 2020 Census.

Keep in mind, that isn’t people commuting into the city. That is people who actually live there.

Yes, people live there.

That’s something that we feel is getting lost in the discourse about the National Guard troop deployments to DC.

More people live in Washington, DC than live in the entire states of Vermont and Wyoming. This is something that sometimes gets brought up when people are pushing DC statehood — no taxation without representation and all that — but DC’s governmental status is only relevant here insofar as it’s important to note that DC is explicitly not a state, per the Constitution.

Technically, the district is under the jurisdiction of Congress, but we all know how much Congress loves to do its various jobs, so much of the actual governing of DC was delegated to elected city representatives in the 1970s under the Home Rule Act.

Anyway.

What we are getting at, here, is that Washington, DC is a living, breathing city chock full of actual people. It’s not just a bunch of empty suits and dresses walking around in between their governmental duties, and it’s not just a bunch of tourism spots.

Those residents are now being subjected to what amounts to functionally an invasion.

Maybe it’s justified.

DC’s own websites shows 29,348 total crimes in 2024 (and 34,369 in 2023). A couple thousand of those are violent, with the majority being property.

To say that’s not great would be an understatement.

Let’s look at Philadelphia. In 2024, Philly saw 8,312 violent crimes and 44,857 property crimes — a total of 53,169.

Now, consider that Philly’s population is 1.574 million — 2.28 times as many people as DC. If you divide out that multiplier into the total crimes statistic, you get 23,329 total crimes expected — which is way under what DC actually reported.

And this is based on Philadelphia, which is frequently placed near the bottom of peoples’ city-safety rankings, according to various polls throughout the last few years.

So, yeah, crime is pretty bad in DC. No arguments on that, and no spineless talk about the “trends,” either. Trends are good and important statistics, but they are only part of the picture.

The question that we find more challenging here is this: does a high crime rate justify a soft invasion of around 1,700 National Guard troops, as of this writing, with Missouri having just joined West Virginia, South Carolina and Ohio in sending forces?

Think about that. Sending forces, to an American city…to perhaps the American city. Doesn’t that make anyone else a bit uncomfortable?

The old phrase “peace of a gun” comes to mind.

Let’s face it and say it plain. Republican-majority states are sending guardsmen to a Democratic city of almost 700,000 people to lay down law.

As students and keepers of history, this is an intensely troubling –and scary — moment.

Again, we will repeat that this is explicitly not an endorsement of crime or any such nonsense.

Crime is bad, full stop, and the challenge of policing that crime effectively while also maintaining as much personal freedom and privacy as possible is one of the core difficulties in American society today.

That does not change that, by a generous definition, the government is skirting increasingly close to implementing a functional police state in America: something that Republicans had argued against for decades.

It was wrong when Democrats wanted to do it. It is still wrong now that Republicans are the ones doing it. This is not a partisan issue. Once all of those guardsmen from the four states that have sent troops — so far — arrive, there will be a density of around 30 troops per square mile, not including police and members of ICE and other agencies.

And amidst it all, those nearly 700,000 Americans are expected to go about their lives. Keep going to work, getting groceries and going out with their friends — all while armed soldiers patrol the streets surrounding them.

In any other country, we would deem that an occupation.

For any other reason, we would deem that an occupation.

The Trump administration is taking a zero-tolerance stance against crime, however, and to the extent that it clamps down on legitimate crimes, that is perhaps noble.

Historically, the problem with zero-tolerance policies is that the world is not black and white, and a new moral panic can be sparked about practically anything.

In case you didn’t know, Pennsylvania has laws on the books outlawing fortune telling, singing in the bathtub, run a Bingo game if you’ve been convicted of a felony or catch a fish with your bare hands, along with other various strange and archaic laws.

Every state has these, and we are pretty sure most people have violated some law at some point in their lives.

We hope that, in their earnest — and justified — desire to reduce the crime rate in the nation’s capitol city, the Trump administration and the various National Guard troops don’t turn to zealotry and absolutism.

History has shown time and time again that situations similar to this can escalate suddenly and dramatically. We pray that this is not one of those cases — and we pray for the hundreds of thousands of people who live there, who are now subjected not only the constant threat of crime but also now the threat of armed soldiers on every street corner.