The Transfer of Control
The news from Washington this week has the texture of something already known to history. A president invoking little-used legal provisions to take control of a city’s police. Federal agents and National Guard troops on urban streets. Arrest numbers presented as proof of necessity. Statements about “long-term” control, about using one city as an “example” for others.
The official reasoning rests on the language of crisis. Public safety is framed as urgent, decisive action, framed as the only responsible choice. In parallel, the structures of local governance are displaced by central authority, and temporary measures are positioned for extension. The legislative process is left waiting.
These are not new inventions; they are familiar moves in the architecture of power.
In the records of the last century, there are always explanations—stability, order, protection from disorder. They often carry elements of truth, which is part of why they are persuasive.
The shift from exception to routine, though, rarely announces itself. A clause is invoked, a deployment ordered, a time limit quietly adjusted. Each step seems discrete. The direction becomes visible only in retrospect.
Distance makes these moments easier to name. In the present, they can appear as administrative matters, as responses to particular incidents, or as measures meant to expire. It is in this ambiguity that change can take root, altering the framework in which a city and its people live.
I think about other times and places when such patterns emerged—how much was noticed, how much was dismissed, how much was accepted because it felt limited to a moment.
Events in Washington this week carry echoes of those earlier patterns. Whether they will fade or grow louder is not yet clear.