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Terry Cole has been selected by President Donald Trump to be the interim federal administrator for D.C.’s police department.
Cole has a long history in both federal and Virginia law enforcement circles, but it’s still not clear how extensive his role as leader will be.
His appointment comes as part of the president’s federal takeover of the city’s police department to address what Trump has referred to as a crime emergency. Meanwhile, D.C. officials have cited a drop in violent crime since 2023.
Cole was confirmed to run the Drug Enforcement Agency by the U.S. Senate in a party-line vote earlier this year.
He returned to the DEA after a 20-year career with the agency. He had previously stepped away for two years as Virginia’s Director of Public Safety and Homeland Security, under Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and taken a brief tenure in the private sector.
ProPublica reporter Tim Golden has covered Cole extensively and said his work with the DEA in Mexico City, and Kabul, Afghanistan, and Bogotá, Colombia, are helpful, as well as management positions with the agency in D.C. and Dallas.
But his two years in Richmond in state government may be more relevant for this new position, Golden said.
“The main experience that would help him, I think is probably his Virginia state experience in which he is working closely with both federal and local agencies. He’s not going to be making decisions about this D.C. policing. I have to assume that a lot of the parameters here are going to be set by the courts,” Tim Golden said. “I don’t think Terry Cole is an ideologue on the scale of a lot of the senior officials who are now filling the ranks of federal justice agencies.”
Pro Publica reported that in April 2000, as a relatively new agent, he was sent to Bogotá as the DEA was in the middle of a billion-dollar initiative called Plan Colombia that was designed to cut corruption and fight the drug cartels.
Cole worked alongside specifically vetted Colombian police officers and in 2006, 10 of those officers were murdered by Colombian military members who were working on behalf of one of the drug cartels, according to CNN. Days later, he and members of his family were evacuated from Colombia.
Youngkin praised Trump’s decision to have Cole oversee the undermanned D.C. police for 30 days, under the president’s emergency powers.
“It is a bad day for criminals in Washington, D.C.,” Youngkin said on X. “Terry Cole knows from our partnership with Director @Kash_Patel and General @PamBondi in Virginia that when we back the blue and let police catch criminals- we make our streets safer!”
But University of Maryland criminologist Thomas Abt said it’s unlikely that, in the designated one-month emergency, Cole will be able to make big changes in the D.C. police force and the District.
“The National Guard, the FBI, ATF all of these other agencies that he is just sending into the city, they don’t have the same legal authority as the Metropolitan Police Department,” he said. “A lot of the criminal justice system in D.C. is already under federal control.”
Abt said Trump is calling for a “surge in law enforcement resources” with an estimated the estimated 800 National Guard troops mobilized in addition to the federal oversight of D.C. police.
“These surges sometimes can push crime down temporarily, but because they don’t address the underlying causes of crime, and they don’t really change the current approaches to crime fighting, they often are not sustainable, and they often don’t make a big difference over time,” Abt said.
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