March 25th, 2025
When my husband first became Mayor of this city, it was an all-white police force hostile to a majority-black community. When I see what you and your group want to do, I see a recurrence of that time.
-Cora Masters Barry questioning Ed Martin, Acting US Attorney General
On March 25, 2025 Ed Martin took questions at the Anacostia Coordinating Committee’s monthly meeting. He spoke to his faith, priorities for his office, position on crime and how to handle prosecutions in the City. He continued to reiterate that his office would listen to the people in the community; the community has plenty to say.
Martin started off by speaking about his and Trump’s vision to “Make DC Safe Again” even though DC had an insanely high crime rate in the early 1990’s and is safer than it has been in over 30 years. (The MAGA people don’t like to break their refrain.)
Gun Law Enforcement
The first question asked was ‘How many gun shops does DC have?’ and ‘What will you do to stop guns coming in from other places?’ Martin said he hadn’t counted how many gun shops DC has (the answer is ZERO) but he understands that most firearms in the district come from North Carolina and Georgia and that the ATF has assured him they can stop the supply of guns. He stated most of the gun crime is “the attitude we have” and his office has charged 18 new gun possession crimes in federal court that will come with steeper penalties and pretrial detention.
Another resident asked how Martin proposed to have a ‘war on guns’ without creating the horrible harms that the ‘war on drugs’ had on his personal community: committing a generation of men to incarceration and obliterating a chance of a productive contribution to society.
Martin acknowledged that the war on drugs “did not work well” and that the ‘war on guns’ would be different because he would listen to the community. (He has said pop-up marijuana shops are ruining communities.) It was at this time he suggested that his faith taught him that you must “love yourself and your family before you can love your neighbor” and that immigration has caused a lot of harm to communities and foreign aid (specifically USAID) has taken needed resources from DC communities. (Mrs. Masters Barry responded that he needed to educate himself on this subject before he began speaking in the community about it.)
Martin stated that people using guns in “our community” are “terrorizing our community.” These could be especially concerning words given the administration’s reclassification of what is considered terrorism. (See Bondi’s notice on people attacking Tesla dealerships, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and a French scientist’s anti-Trump tweets.)
Juveniles
Martin repeated on multiple occasions that juveniles were “being used” or “manipulated” by parts of the system and people in the community. He signaled that he wants to take some autonomy from Brian Schwalb’s office by prosecuting juvenile crime and charging 16 and 17 year olds as adults. This would reverse a strong movement within the community to address juvenile crime from a restorative viewpoint. Martin stated that “young people will do better if they are imprisoned far away” and that “group homes don’t work.” When confronted by an audience member that research shows that young people who stay closer to their community actually do much better with lower rates of recidivism, Martin responded that he was open to hearing about that. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor and has spent the majority of his career as a political operative.
Priorities & Approach
When asked how his faith informed his work, he replied, “I wanted this job because there’s a lot we could do to help people out.” He wants to prioritize filling the 13 judicial vacancies in DC Superior Court, creating a better juvenile center, building a better adult jail, and adding another 5-800 police officers to MPD. (DC is looking at a FY26 budget $2-4 billion dollars less than FY25.) Martin said he called Mike Johnson about passing the Senate bill to free up DC’s FY25 funds and that it all “would be worked out.”
Other individual statements included:
“I’m more conservative than Trump.”
“My relationship with the City Council has been phenomenal. My relationship with the Mayor has been phenomenal.”
“We need to make our Metro and bus stops safe. We have an ungodly number of people exposing themselves …on public transportation.”
“What has been missing [in this office] is a relationship between the prosecutor, police, and public.”
Ed Martin has posted that he will prosecute anyone attempting to interfere with DOGE, that he will prosecute sitting members of Congress for attacks on Elon Musk, that he will not hire anyone from Georgetown Law School unless the institution changes its DEI polices, and that all abortions should be criminally prosecuted, including abortions induced by mifepristone. Ed Martin has stated that Jan 6th was staged by Antifa and Nancy Pelosi and the “coffee man.”
I encourage everyone to read more about Martin’s History. See How Does Ed Martin Affect DC?
