Maine’s congressional delegation had mixed reactions to President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the District of Columbia’s metropolitan police department and deploy National Guard troops to address crime in the nation’s capital.

Trump announced Monday that federal officials would assume operations of the district police and send in 800 members of the National Guard to combat “out of control” and “rising violence,” even though police data show that violent crime is at a 30-year low and declining.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins said that although Washington is safer than it was in the 1980s, it has struggled with “crime and vagrancy” since the pandemic. She didn’t criticize Trump’s moves but urged him to work with Mayor Muriel Bowser, whom she called “a very positive and capable leader.”

Collins also urged Trump to limit federal control over local police to the short term.

“I agree with the president that this is a problem and that additional resources are needed to address it,” Collins said in a written statement.

Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, criticized the announcement, noting that violent crime is at a 30-year low in D.C. They called on House Republicans to provide local officials with $1 billion in funding collected from district taxpayers that was excluded from a stop-gap funding bill through September.

King also accused Trump of constitutional overreach.

“This is one more example of this president asserting powers he does not have — the governing of the district is explicitly granted to Congress in the Constitution – and unnecessarily deploying the military in domestic law enforcement, which should never be done except in the most extreme circumstances,” King said in a written statement.

Rep. Jared Golden, D-2nd District, had a mixed reaction, defending both D.C.’s right to local control and Trump’s authority to nationalize the city’s police force “under certain conditions.” He said the courts would be a proper venue to resolve disputes over whether those conditions have been met.

“For my part, I’ll say that in my time in D.C., I’ve come to respect the service-oriented professionalism of both the Metropolitan Police and the D.C. National Guard and am confident in their abilities regardless of how this ongoing development unfolds,” he said.

Although Trump’s executive actions cite “out of control” crime and “rising violence,” police data shows that violent crime is actually down in Washington. In January, the U.S. Attorney’s Office there announced that violent crime — homicides, sexual abuse, assault with a dangerous weapon and robbery — was at a 30-year low, and local police reported violent crime has dropped another 26% as of Aug. 11.

Trump’s announcement Monday demonstrates an increasing willingness of his administration to use the National Guard in U.S. cities. Over the summer, Trump deployed nearly 5,000 National Guard members to Los Angeles in response to protests against his hard-line immigration crackdown.

Trump painted a bleak picture of Washington in a news conference Monday, saying “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

“Today I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump said, later mentioning crime in other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Baltimore and Oakland. “We’re not going to lose our cities over this. This is going to go further.”

In addition to taking over the D.C. police force, Trump authorized deploying the National Guard to address street crime. The order allows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deploy as many troops as needed for as long as is needed to address the declared emergency.

King said in a written statement that he did not understand why Trump was taking “such dramatic, costly action” when D.C. police are successfully bringing down crime. King compared it to Trump’s recent firing of his labor commissioner after unflattering job numbers were released earlier this month.

“Just days after the president chose to ignore the math of tariffs and labor statistics, this may be another example of the president deciding that reality and stats aren’t fitting his personal narrative, talking tough, and changing the subject,” King said.

Pingree called Trump’s move “incredibly alarming,” saying it “ignores the reality” that violent crime is declining.

“That’s not to say crime isn’t an issue,” she said. “But militarizing the city in such a sudden and aggressive way isn’t going to solve the problem.”

Pingree said “most alarming” is Trump’s suggestion that troops could be deployed to other cities.

“Threatening to send federal troops into American cities simply because you don’t agree with how those cities are being run is a dangerous abuse of power — and underscores the increasingly authoritarian impulses of this administration,” she said.