This article was originally published by Connor O’Keeffe at The Mises Institute. 

We’re now in the second week of Trump’s so-called “takeover” of Washington, DC, where he’s formally federalized the city’s police and mobilized national guard troops and federal agents to help crack down on crime. So far, a few hundred people have been arrested.

City officials quickly filed lawsuits last week, which allowed federal judges to freeze some aspects of the president’s move. All while the establishment media frames the entire episode as Trump, for the first time in the country’s history, ushering in a federal “police state.”

The right, in contrast, has seemed to enjoy the optics of armed agents in tactical gear flanked by armored National Guard vehicles patrolling DC neighborhoods, arresting people, and clearing homeless encampments in a city that has, indeed, become embarrassingly dangerous.

And, although Trump’s power to do this in DC is—as of now—limited to thirty days, many of his supporters and people of all political stripes who are tired of the level of violent crime are calling for the president to kickstart similar efforts in other American cities.

However, genuine or not, the president’s effort to clean up DC and any other crime-ridden cities is hampered by a misunderstanding of the true root of this blue-city crime phenomenon, which is the monopolization of the protection of person and property—arguably the most important service in society.

Many on the right talk about blue city crime as if it’s simply a resource problem. Trump’s mobilization of men and resources seems, at least in part, to be based on this assumption.

But that really isn’t the case. The Defund the Police movement from five years ago made a lot of noise, but funding levels for police departments only rose in the aftermath of the 2020 riots. The police forces in these crime-ridden cities get plenty of taxpayer dollars and enjoy access to a lot of obnoxious equipment that often comes directly from the military.

The more sophisticated argument is that many of these city governments have been run by progressives who—in response to the very real over-incarceration of the American population—have decided to stop prosecuting people for “lower-level” violent property crimes like car smash-and-grabs and shoplifting.

That is true, and much closer to the root of the problem. It’s not a lack of resources; it’s a refusal to use the resources they already have.

But still, what makes this such a widespread and serious problem is the monopolization of protection services. Because at the same time so many of these governments are refusing to provide adequate protection, they have also cracked down very harshly on civilians who have attempted to protect their own property when the police proved to be unreliable.

In other words, these city and state governments have gone to great lengths to ensure that they are the only ones with the legal right to protect people and property. Then they sit back and refuse to provide the service they’re monopolizing—especially on government property like streets and parks.

Yes, the recent withholding of adequate protection in blue cities has largely been driven by a left-progressive theory that the justice system would be more just if it did less. But that has been empowered by a monopoly status that the right has been either uninterested in or, worse, outright opposed to rolling back.

What both sides need to understand is that the key to justice and security does not lie in an across-the-board increase or decrease in policing, incarceration, or prosecutions but in a consistent commitment to property rights and the effective protection of those rights.

Although the situation in cities like DC has been so egregious that Trump sending people to at least try to stop some crimes may bring a temporary improvement, the effective protection of our rights will not come from the federal government. And it certainly won’t come from federal “law enforcement” agencies like the FBI or ATF. The American right, especially, should not put any trust in or hand any more power to de facto domestic intelligence agencies that clearly have it out for them.

What anyone serious about eradicating America’s violent crime problem needs to prioritize is rolling back the monopolistic restrictions governments have placed on private citizens’ ability to legally and adequately protect themselves, their families, and their property when better alternatives are unavailable.