No one asked for Trump’s troops but maybe they’ll do some good
While president Trump’s despotic crime crackdown draws scrutiny, deploying troops on US soil is hardly unprecedented. For local officials, perhaps the presence of guardsmen might also provide a chance to tap federal resources.
Democratic mayors and governors are crying foul and filing lawsuits after president Donald Trump deployed the National Guard into Chicago and Portland. Regional leaders insist that their cities are doing fine and that the presence of guardsmen will not make their communities any safer.
In turn, these local officials urge citizens not to take the bait and feed into the president’s asinine perception that, say, Portland is “war-ravaged”. But of course, protesters can’t resist the chance to, well, resist, creating cover for hot-headed radicals to gear up for clashes with federal agents. The whole drama has become so predictable that it hardly seems worth our attention.
So why not call the White House’s bluff and welcome guardsmen into blue cities? After all, there is ample evidence that judicious use of reservists can help struggling local governments reduce crime.
New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul called the guard into the city’s subway system last year and touted a near 10 per cent reduction in crime aboard transit. In 2023, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom crowed that the state’s national guardsmen had seized a record 28,224kg of fentanyl at the US-Mexico border, stating that it was “enough to potentially kill the global population – nearly twice over.” This year, another Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, authorised the deployment of National Guard personnel in Albuquerque due to a rise in fentanyl-related crime.
The National Guard operates more like a state militia rather than a federal army. However, under a 19th-century law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, military troops cannot be used for domestic law enforcement unless authorised by Congress. That distinction is what makes these recent cases different from the White House’s imperious approach that takes soldiers away from their families and civilian jobs merely to score political points. And to make matters worse, in the midst of a government shutdown, National Guard members could be required to work without pay.
Trump often has a reverse Midas touch, promising policies turn to poison rather than gold. In that vein, the idea of deploying federal troops on US soil has become yet another political football, with Republican governors from Louisiana to Tennessee calling for guardsmen in New Orleans and Memphis – both cities with Democratic mayors – as a way of tarring their political opponents for poor governance on crime.
The truth is, the number of urban crimes has continued to fall nationwide since it spiked at the beginning of this decade. But reverting to 2019 crime rates should not be viewed as an acceptable status quo. US cities are still more dangerous and disorderly than their Asian or European counterparts (a significant reason why they continue not to earn high marks on Monocle’s annual Quality of Life Survey) and insufficient police presence is one factor. The French might stage protests to raise the retirement age or to condemn the cancellation of public holidays but they do not dispute the legitimacy of the Gendarmerie nationale to police their cities.
I urge mayors to treat National Guard deployment as an opportunity to temporarily bolster depleted police ranks on state and federal dimes. With municipal governments facing budget crunches nationwide, scorning public servants who come at no cost is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. If there truly isn’t any enforcement to be done by the troops, then put reservists to work picking up trash and cleaning up graffiti, just as we saw in Washington. A little clean-up never hurt anyone.
