I've seen a lot of reporting about what the environment is like, but tell us what the scene is like from your perspective.

Yeah, I mean, the courtroom gallery has been pretty much full every day this week.

Obviously, the local press corps, you know, all of us are there.

You've also got lots of, some of the supporters, close friends, family of Trayon White's in the audience there every day in solidarity with him.

And then you also have just members of the public, members of the D.C. legal community who have been watching just because they're interested to see this trial and interested to see what happens in the courtroom.

Things have been pretty quiet, although yesterday Judge Contreras did admonish some members of the gallery who had been having some louder reactions to some of the testimony over the last couple of days.

The testimony has been a bit more emotional or explosive because this government star witness, Aliyu Kamara, the government informant who allowed the FBI to surreptitiously film his meetings with White, he was on the stand the last couple of days.

Can you summarize quickly Trayon's case? defense he acknowledges taking the money in this scheme but he says he didn't do anything for it it wasn't a bribe and that this and kamara the the witness had been giving him money all along for campaign donations where's the bribe i think he's saying

The parents can say, "You can't go there because there's a curfew."

The city, at the urging of Mayor Bowser and a couple council members, has put in place a policy where young people under the age of 18 are forbidden from gathering in groups of more than eight in certain designated places that the police chief can choose and set a temporary, more intense curfew zone in advance of what they see as a planned takeover, right? So if the police chief sees one of these flyers and gets the sense that young people are slated to gather in Navy Yard, they will often declare a special curfew zone in Navy Yard, um, that forbids teens from gathering in groups and gives police the ability to disperse them if it, you know, the clock hits 8:00 and there are more than eight young people in that space.

It feels like a sort of philosophical question about what to do about kids wilding out.

Yeah, I mean, I think it cuts across a lot of different issues that get at people's emotions.

It gets at issues of public space, issues of race, issues of class, um, issues of sort of who has the right to occupy space in a city.

And also issues about, you know, policing, the role of police in a city and the role of police with young people.

And then also public safety and fear.

I mean, a lot of what's motivating the mayor here is that she's worried that something really bad might happen at one of these.

Um, that doesn't sound like it's legal, but has he articulated a plan for what he wants to do with DC's unhoused population?

Not really.

I was speaking to a DC council member, um, who oversees the committee that, uh, deals with homelessness issues in DC yesterday and he said, he described this as sort of reading tea leaves from Truth Social posts, so I think it's still coming into focus what this exactly looks like.

Some context here, uh, a lot of, you know, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the green space in the city is controlled by the federal government, it's federal parkland.

And so federal police have historically worked with DC police to clear encampments of people experiencing homelessness on those federal lands.

That is not necessarily a new thing, um, for the city.

DC has for years, you know, um, had an initiative where they clear homeless encampments.

Wow.