Officers with the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the Metropolitan Police Department conduct a traffic stop in Washington, on August 15. Republican governors who have mustered National Guard troops for deployment in blue-state cities may re-examine their deployments if federal intervention significantly brings crime down. Photo / Tierney L. Cross, The New York Times
When Tennessee’s Republican Governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington DC to support President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines.
Memphis, Tennessee, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous United States cities, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to FBI statistics. Nashville, Tennessee, has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well.
The same questions could be asked of other Republican governors including Greg Abbott in Texas, Mike DeWine in Ohio, and Mike Kehoe in Missouri, since cities under their purview all have higher rates of violent crime than the US capital. Yet no Republican governor has asked for federal intervention.
The image of red-state governors mustering uniformed troops for duty in blue-state cities has left many Americans with the foreboding sense of a nation dangerously divided, perhaps even drifting toward open conflict.
Trump denied statistical reality last week when he was asked whether he might send federal forces into high-crime cities in Republican-led states. “Sure,” he said. “But there aren’t that many.”
There are that many: Kansas City, St Louis and Springfield, Missouri; Birmingham, Alabama; Cleveland, Dayton and Toledo, Ohio; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Memphis and Nashville; Houston; Little Rock, Arkansas; Salt Lake City; and Shreveport, Louisiana.
All have crime rates comparable to Washington’s, according to FBI statistics.
The reality of Trump’s deployments in Washington has also not matched the stark “invasion” rhetoric of some Democrats, who have raised the spectre of an uninvited occupying force in their cities.
Indeed, Republican governors who have so far declined to ask the President for an intervention in their cities might be tempted to rethink that stance.
The supplementary forces in Washington, provided by and funded by Trump, have had a noticeable impact, at least in the short term.
Washington’s Mayor, Muriel Bowser, has softened her tone on the deployment, crediting it for “more accountability” and a reduction in some crimes, particularly carjackings.
Even in Chicago, which Trump has said may be next in his crime agenda, the signals lately have been mixed.
Brandon Johnson, the city’s progressive Democratic Mayor, has stood resolutely against his streets being “occupied by federal troops”, but his police chief, Larry Snelling, has struck a softer tone.
If the National Guard were to flood his city, Snelling told reporters last week, he hoped that with better communication, local and federal forces could “find some type of balance” and avoid “an adversarial environment”.
Red-state governors sending their National Guard troops to blue-state cities is just another example of the political divide in the country that has become the standard.
It is also another example of Republicans going out of the way to curry favour with Trump.
Republican governors did not want to answer why they were willing to send their National Guard troops to Washington while not inviting the same attention to their cities.
In Texas, Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, declined to comment on whether the governor had made any specific requests of Trump to help fight crime in San Antonio or Houston. The question, he said, should be directed to the Department of Homeland Security.
Dan Tierney, a spokesperson for DeWine, said under Ohio law, mayors would have to request any assistance from the state, and “no current mayoral requests for National Guard assistance” have come in.
Aides to Lee of Tennessee did not respond to the question.
Adam Gelb, the president and chief executive of the Council on Criminal Justice, a non-partisan research organisation, stated what he said was obvious — Trump is not basing his interventions on crime rates.
“The federal government almost never does anything based on pure statistics,” Gelb said.
“No administration would just look at a chart and go straight down the list based on rates of violence.”
Jeffrey Butts, executive director of the Research and Evaluation Centre at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, noted that even in Washington, federal resources are not actually being targeted where they would make the most difference.
That’s high-crime neighbourhoods - far from the photogenic monuments and government buildings where National Guard troops are patrolling.
“If you accept the premise that it is okay to use military resources in the name of securing public safety, which is very debatable and I think historically should be rejected, they would be in the communities with the highest rates of gun violence,” Butts said.
“They’re not doing it to improve public safety,” he continued. “It’s designed to humiliate political opponents.”
If Trump has a political imperative, so do his targets. States need to balance their budgets, unlike the federal government.
The US government is covering the cost of more than 2000 National Guard troops sent to Washington from six states, at an estimated cost of US$1 million ($1.7m) a day. That serves as a reminder that such resources could also be available in other cities, if requested.
Federal support for local policing has also had a long history of bipartisan support.
Bowser is one of many Democratic politicians who have sought to put more police on the beat but have run up against budget constraints.
Democrats in Congress have been the primary champions of federal assistance for local police forces through the Community Oriented Policing Services — or Cops — programme, first passed as part of President Bill Clinton’s crime bill in 1994.
Federal-local partnerships have always shown promise, said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Centre for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland.
Working with mayors and local officials, the centre has become involved with violence reduction efforts in Memphis and Knoxville, Tennessee, as well as St Louis and Boston.
In all four cities, reforms have emphasised intervening with the people and places at the highest risk of violence, balancing accountability with empathy, and maintaining legitimacy and credibility in high-crime communities, said Abt, who wrote a book on violence reduction, Bleeding Out.
Knoxville, St Louis, and Boston have seen violent crime rates decline faster than the national average, he said, and Memphis — the newest city to partner with the centre — is on track to join them.
“Reducing crime is a team sport,” he said. “Mayors and governors would appreciate sustained support and sustained collaboration from their federal partners. They always have and they always will.”
But Democratic governors say that vision has little in common with the masked federal agents and uniformed military troops on Washington’s streets.
In a statement last week, 19 Democratic governors said the President had cut federal funding for law enforcement and was undermining their authority over their respective National Guards.
“Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland, and New York or another state tomorrow, the President’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members,” the governors said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David W. Chen
Photographs by: Tierney L. Cross, Haiyun Jiang
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