What's The Crackdown On Cities Really Accomplishing?

2025-09-21 10:11:11

(MENAFN- Live Mint) (Bloomberg Opinion) -- It was a busy week for the Trump Administration - a state visit to the UK, a crackdown on free speech following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, and more partisan pressure applied to the Federal Reserve. Amid all of that, you could be forgiven for barely noticing that on Monday, President Donald Trump announced that he had established the Memphis Safe Task Force, a precursor to the deployment of National Guard troops in yet another American city.

And that's perhaps what's most alarming of all: mobilizing troops to US cities is almost becoming ordinary.

The details are still emerging, but a surge of boots on the ground in an American city that has led the nation in violent crime is going to be more popular than many Democrats will be willing to acknowledge. Trump's diagnosis that crime is a major issue resonates with many Americans. According to an AP-NORC poll released on Friday, 53% of the country thinks it's acceptable for the National Guard to assist police in large cities.

But by invoking emergency powers when emergencies don't exist in order to use force when it is unwarranted, Trump is not only testing the bounds of his legal authority, he is building the predicate for something America has not seen since Reconstruction - military control of civilian law-enforcement duties. In any other country, we'd call this what it is: a police state.

The president's deployment of troops to major urban areas is in keeping with his combative approach to domestic policy. He envisions his newly rebranded“Department of War” doing everything from cleaning up city streets to shooting alleged drug-runners. Following Kirk's killing, Trump administration officials also announced investigations into“radical left” groups they were beginning to brand as“domestic terrorists.”

After a federal appeals court ruled that Trump's decision to take over the California National Guard and send troops into Los Angeles without Governor Gavin Newsom's permission was illegal, he signed an executive order directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to create a National Guard“quick reaction force” that can be deployed to any city across the country.“We're going to take care of all of them, step by step just like we did in DC,” Trump said on Monday, after signing the order to deploy troops to Memphis. He then inaccurately claimed,“we have virtually no crime in DC right now.”

Make no mistake, this isn't really about reducing crime. Using the National Guard to reinforce the work of urban police can briefly lower crime rates but, if the effort doesn't address the core drivers of crime - such as too few jobs and too many guns - little is likely to change. That's clear from what happened when the governments of Colombia, Mexico and Brazil sent in soldiers to police cities with high crime rates.

“In each of those cases, the results show either it didn't have any effect on crime at all, or things just got worse,” said Robert Blair, an associate professor of political science at Brown University who studied the military policing intervention in Cali, Colombia.“This strategy is ineffective at best, and probably it is counterproductive,” Blair told me.

Trump's approach to crime is political theater, not a long-term solution. If he were truly interested in lowering crime rates, he would not have slashed funding for local law enforcement programs that had proven successful. That he's pursuing this goal in parallel with a crackdown on political criticism he's rebranding as“domestic terrorism” only makes it even more frightening.

Even governors who may welcome the assistance of National Guard troops face legal hurdles to giving Trump what he wants. Tennessee law, for example, only allows the governor to deploy the National Guard to respond to an“invasion, disaster, insurrection, riot, attack, or combination.” It would be tough to present a crime wave as one of those, especially when state and local data indicate that crime in Memphis, including violent crime, is at a 25-year low. But that doesn't mean GOP governors won't try.

Trump is appealing the ruling that said his deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which was passed after Reconstruction and forbids the military from enforcing civilian laws except during limited circumstances such as an insurrection. For Trump to deploy the military to do police work in Memphis as he suggests, the courts would have to allow a dangerous expansion of the law.

But say that he succeeds. The result may not be that cities feel safer. Trump's National Guard surges and excessively punitive approaches might actually increase crime, according to a growing body of evidence from criminal justice researchers. A recent report out of the Brookings Institution found that these efforts to impose federal and state control over local policing policies“are the antithesis of an evidence-based approach and risk significant negative consequences to community and fiscal well-being.”

A military presence in city neighborhoods can make residents feel that things are worse than they appear, explained Nick Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice advocacy organization.

That fear can foster support for draconian law enforcement measures that are highly visible even if they're not effective.“In our work, we have found these sorts of policies don't need to have a measurable impact on crime for people to like them,” Blair told me.“In fact, the more intensely people were exposed to it, the more they liked it.”

Trump has always painted conditions in US cities as worse than they are, stoking fear to gain political power. But sending National Guard troops to cities when there is no emergency is legally unjustifiable. At a cost to the federal government of about $1 million a day, it's also unsustainable. And when it comes to lowering crime rates, in the long term it will be unsuccessful.

But, as National Guard troops get deployed to more and more US cities, Trump is achieving something that no previous American president has ever achieved: making the militarization of American cities seem normal.