'Opening salvo': Professor warns Trump’s DC takeover an attempt at something 'more severe'

President Donald Trump's federal takeover of the Washington, D.C. police is just the beginning of something much darker, University of Maryland political science professor Dr. Niambi Carter told MSNBC's Jason Johnson on Monday evening.

"When Trump sent in federal troops and everything else like that, you know, sending the Marines to try and take over Los Angeles — Los Angeles is a huge city," said Johnson. "People were still having brunch and didn't know what was happening in downtown. Washington, D.C. is a lot more compact."

As a result, he added, "I'm getting texts and Instagram pictures ... from people today talking about teenagers being, you know, yanked off the streets for, you know, for playing their music too loud or people being arrested and handled roughly for just smoking marijuana, which they're allowed to do in certain parts of the city. What do you think could be the long term impact on this?"

"I think this is Donald Trump's sort of opening salvo to see how far he can push this," said Carter. "I mean, the thing about D.C. is, for a long time, young people in this city — who are not very many, they're about 6-10 percent of the population — are more represented in the justice system than anybody else, right, in this city ... and I think people need to be very careful here."

What people need to realize, she continued, is that "one of the things that D.C. does not have is a prison system. So you start getting these younger people in the criminal justice system sooner. You're going to more likely see these people be charged as adults, which he said he wanted juveniles to be charged as adults, and they're going to be sent further away from the district. And we know this is going to have all kinds of effects, like congressional representation for the states that take these young people."

"But more importantly, I think we have to remember, D.C. has been a political football for a really long time, right, going back to like Vincent Gray's days in the 90s, right, when there was a D.C. control board," Carter added. "I think this is an attempt to do something more severe than that and put D.C. into almost a kind of receivership and really maintain control, not just of the laws of the city and the people of the city, but also the coffers of the city, which are quite full right now. And I think that's something we cannot forget, that D.C. commands billions of dollars for a city its size. And so that has to be attractive on some dimension to this federal government."

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