'You Would've Thought The Taliban Was About To Attack': Glenn Ivey Decries Military Presence In D.C.

Forbes Breaking News

During a press briefing on Wednesday, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) spoke about the heavy military presence in Washington, D.C. amid President Trump's federal takeover.

Transcript

00:00Good morning. My name is Glen Ivey. I'm the congressman who represents Prince

00:07George's County which is the eastern border of Washington DC. I have two of

00:12my kids that live here in the Washington DC. One of my grandkids lives

00:16here and I was a federal prosecutor down the street for four years here in

00:19Washington DC. So I understand how this ought to work. When I was prosecuting

00:24there DC was having somewhere in the range of 450 to 500 homicides per year

00:29crime has been going down dramatically since then certainly in the last couple

00:33of years and it's been going down for a couple of reasons. One is that

00:38they've been doing an outstanding job of integrating enforcement with

00:41intervention prevention programs that have been moving things down getting

00:45the guns off the street but more importantly making sure that you don't

00:50just get there after the shots have been fired and somebody's on the ground. You

00:54try to reach out to these kids who are in trouble before they get to that point and

00:58take care of it then. The Biden administration had put programs in

01:02place to help do that. We know it's not serious for the Trump administration

01:06because one of the first things he did was cut the funding for those kind of

01:09programs and we also know this isn't a serious effort because one of the first

01:13things they did was eliminate the Office of Gun Violence Reduction which had

01:17also played a key role in reducing gun violence in these cities and instead of

01:21doing that what he's done instead is to put soldiers out on the street,

01:26soldiers who don't have the training or the ability to help to deal with

01:31policing for example they don't know anything about chain of custody. If they

01:34seize any evidence there's a good chance it'll get suppressed because they don't

01:37know how to do it, they don't know how to Mirandize suspects. So what you could

01:40end up with those two scenarios in place if they get involved in policing is

01:44serious crimes like murders and rapes actually getting thrown out on

01:48constitutional grounds. We want people on the streets who can help to deal with

01:52issues affecting law enforcement that are trained to do it. Now if you want to

01:57bring in FBI or DEA or ATF we'd love to have them in Prince George's County. We've

02:01got a lot of that here in Washington DC. Those are people who can make a

02:05difference but what I've seen with these guys on the street here, my wife and I

02:09went out for dinner a couple of weeks ago down at the wharf and I saw about 30 of

02:14these troops dressed in camouflage with combat military weapons, M4s, and driving

02:22combat vehicles, armored vehicles. Now you would have thought the Taliban was about

02:26to attack or something and one of the real problems with the M4 guns is twofold.

02:31One is you know for regular civilian police there's a force continuum that

02:36they can use. They don't have to go to deadly force right away. They've got tasers and

02:40pepper spray and the like. We want to use that but the other big one too is M4s

02:43are so powerful if you shoot somebody even if you hit the right guy the

02:49bullets going to keep going through the body and go and potentially hit other

02:52people and so on the wharf that day when they're walking around with these

02:56weapons of military impact on that street we had people who were civilians

03:00just like me sitting there eating dinner wondering if these guys really know what

03:04to do if something actually happened of a regular kind of crime scenario. Let's

03:09move away from this kind of nonsense. Let's get off the show. The show costs a

03:13million dollars a day here in the District of Columbia which is crazy while

03:17they're withholding one point one billion dollars of DC's own money which

03:21the mayor said if you release it I want to hire more cops and teachers. Those are

03:26exactly the people we need to help deal with these issues and the last point I'll

03:31make on is this. This is a long-term issue. We need long-term solutions to

03:37address it. Not 30 days not 60 days not cops or fake cops soldiers who were out

03:43here on the street just for five or ten minutes basically walking tourist traps

03:47here in town instead of actually helping to get the criminals off the street.

03:51Let's move towards that. Let's give the cities the funding back that they were

03:55they were using to bring crime crime down. Let's give them back the money that

03:59they need to get more officers on the street. The Trump administration is putting

04:03up $50,000 signing bonuses to get these guys to join ICE but they won't do it for

04:09local police departments like this one or Prince George's County because we're

04:13all competing for more cops. Let's help us out that way. Help us put more cops on

04:18the street instead of the show the fake show of National Guard troops walking

04:22around in tourist areas in camouflage and armored vehicles which you know they

04:27can't use for actual policing. Thank you.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended