Trump doesn’t care about crime – his National Guard troops are pure authoritarian political theatre

Flooding Washington DC with thousands of troops isn’t about maintaining law and order – Trump wants his enemies to see how far he can go, says Eric Lewis

Violent crime has existed forever. It is urban and rural; its victims are of all races and classes, but they are disproportionately Black and poor. Rates of violent crime ebb and flow and it is far greater in some places than others. While one violent crime is one too many, eliminating it is as impossible as eliminating death or taxes.

As global crime statistics illustrate, fewer guns lead to fewer homicides, but in the United States, effective gun control becomes ever more hopeless. Indeed, the new US attorney for Washington DC has announced that she will no longer prosecute the carrying of guns and rifles. Other techniques have proven effective, though not in eliminating crime, but in reducing it substantially. As a general rule, increasing the number of better-trained cops familiar with communities where violent crime is more prevalent has made a difference in controlling crime.

But Trump’s flooding of Washington DC with thousands of untrained, largely out-of-town soldiers and federal agents is authoritarian political theatre masquerading as crime control, with a heavy dose of racial intimidation.

It is a core part of his strategy to divide the country and demonise groups to solidify his coalition, numb the country to what is occurring through false promises of safety, and normalise the ostracising of those who do not sign on to his authoritarian vision.

Political leaders have used crime to create moral panics for centuries. They focus on communicating that some great evil is threatening society and must be stopped, effectively at any cost. That is not to say that crime is not a significant problem; indeed, the Trump playbook is a familiar one, inducing Democrats to fall into the trap of saying that people’s fears about crime are overblown and that the statistics tell a different story.

George HW Bush ran his campaign against Michael Dukakis with endless invocations of Willie Horton, a Black man who left prison on a furlough and committed a violent crime. As Bill Keller wrote for The Marshall Project, all 50 states then had a furlough programme, including many for murderers. Bush ran his presidential campaign as if he were running for local district attorney and Dukakis walked into the trap.

Keller observed: “The Willie Horton ad has inspired campaigns across the country and still does. You’ll see these Willie Horton-style ads that will flash a portrait of the candidate who’s being reviled next to some inmate who looks like the devil incarnate in his mugshot.” Often, the “devil incarnate” is a person of colour.

Trump’s programme is to use crime as a wedge issue for his political agenda. Washington DC is the pilot programme. Trump has started there because he can; it is not a state, and the president has certain powers there that he does not elsewhere with respect to policing functions. But it is no coincidence that Washington DC is both more than 90 per cent Democratic and that the largest single ethnic group is Black.

Fox News reports that more than 2,300 National Guard members have been deployed on the streets of Washington. Of those, the majority are not part of the DC National Guard; they are from deep red states that are mainly rural – Louisiana, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee. Ironically, cities in three of these states – Louisiana, Ohio and Tennessee – have among the highest murder rates in the country, higher than Washington and many others.

Armed National Guard troops stationed outside the White House in Washington DC on Monday (Getty)

The National Guard have now been authorised to carry weapons. They are not deployed in high crime areas; they are mainly there for show, around monuments and tourist attractions and “checkpoints”. Trump’s deployment of armed guards has been supplemented by approximately 900 more federal officers, including FBI and ICE.

None of these people deployed are trained in local law enforcement, which is wholly different to the training of National Guards or federal agents. It is estimated that the DC Police force deploys about 1,300 officers per day on the streets, so the federal presence is more than two and a half times the local police force, which is the sixth-largest police force in the country, policing a city that is the 22nd-largest in the country.

Trained police can help prevent crime, in Washington and elsewhere. But soldiers in armoured Humvees carrying machine guns in front of the train station or the Washington Monument will not reduce crime. Nor will FBI agents giving out tickets to drivers on their cellphones. And surely, if they are not reducing violent crime (which is meaningful, but at a 30-year low), there must be far better uses for their skill sets.

Trump daily previews his plans to replicate what he is doing and flood the streets of cities in other blue states with National Guardsmen; one day it is New York; the next Baltimore, then Chicago, or Los Angeles. Do these cities have crime problems? To be sure, but certainly not as bad as Memphis or Saint Louis or Little Rock or other places shipping their National Guard to the capital. What is the difference? One group are governed by Maga friends and the other by enemies and rivals.

Yes, while crime is down, there is still too much crime. That is a truism. There are ways to reduce crime further. But that is not what Trump intends to do or cares about doing. He does not want safe streets; he wants a show of force, where his enemies are intimidated and his supporters revel in that intimidation.

Eric Lewis is a human rights lawyer who sits on the board of The Independent