(Bloomberg Standing)-It was a busy week for Trump’s administration-State visit to Great Britain, intervention of freedom of expression after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and more guerrilla pressure applied to the federal reserve. In the middle of all this, you would have been forgiven that you barely noticed that on Monday President Donald Trump announced that he had founded Memphis Safe Task Force, the predecessor of the deployment of the National Guard soldiers in another American city.
And this is perhaps what is all alarming: mobilization of soldiers to American cities is almost common.
Details are still appearing, but the increase in shoes on Earth in the American city that led the nation in violent crime will be more popular than many democrats will be willing to recognize. Trump’s diagnosis that crime is the main problem resonates with many Americans. According to an AP-NORC survey published on Friday, 53% of the country thinks it is acceptable for the National Guard to help the police in large cities.
But by calling emergency powers, where there are no extraordinary events to use strength, if it is unfounded, Trump not only tests the boundaries of its legal authority, but builds a predicate for something that America has not seen-invoking control over law enforcement. In any other country, we would call it what it is: a police state.
The deployment of the President of the soldiers in the main urban areas is in line with his combat access to domestic politics. He imagines that his new rebranded “Department of War” does everything from cleaning city streets to the shooting of alleged drug runners. After Kirk’s killing officials, Trump administration also announced an investigation into the “radical left -wing” groups, which they began to call “domestic terrorists”.
After the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that Trump’s decision to take over the California National Guard and sending the soldiers to Los Angeles without the Governor of Gavin Newsom, he was unlawful, signed a executive order that directed Minister of Defense Pete Hegseth to create a “rapid reaction force” that can be deployed throughout the country. Deploying soldiers in Memphis. Then he inaccurately claimed, “We have virtually no crime right now.”
Don’t make a mistake, it’s not a reduction in crime. The use of the National Guard to strengthen the work of the municipal police can briefly reduce the level of crime, but if effort does not deal with the basic drivers of the crime – such as too few jobs and too many weapons – there will probably be little. This is evident from what happened when the governments of Colombia, Mexico and Brazil sent soldiers to police cities with a high degree of crime.
“In each of these cases, the results show that they either had no effect on crime, or things just got worse,” said Robert Blair, associate professor of political science at Brown University, who studied military police intervention in Colombia Cali. “This strategy is at best ineffective and is probably counterproductive,” Blair told me.
Trump’s approach to crime is a political theater, not a long -term solution. If he was really interested in reducing crime, he should not reduce the financing of local programs enforcement that proved to be successful. The fact that this objective follows in parallel with the intervention against political criticism, rebranding, because “domestic terrorism” is only more terrifying.
Even governors who can welcome the help of National Guard soldiers face legal obstacles to give Trump what they want. For example, the Tennessee Act only allows the Governor to deploy the National Guard to respond to “invasion, disaster, rebellion, riots, attack or combination”. It would be difficult to present a wave of crime, because one of them, especially when state and local data suggest that the crime in Memphis, including violent crime, is at a 25 -year minimum. However, this does not mean that GOP governors will not try it.
Trump refers to a decision stating that its deployment of federal units in Los Angeles violated the law of Posse Comitatus, which was handed over after reconstruction and prohibits the army in enforcing civil laws, except for limited circumstances such as rebellion. To put Trump deployed the army to do police work in Memphis, as he proposes, the courts would have to allow a dangerous expansion of the law.
But say it will succeed. The result may not be that cities feel safer. According to a growing set of evidence from research staff of criminal judiciary, Trump’s National Guard and excessively repressive approaches could actually increase crime. A recent report from the Brookings Institution has found that this effort to store federal and state control over local police policies “is the opposite of evidence -based approach and risk significant negative consequences for community and fiscal well -being”.
The military presence in urban districts can make the inhabitants feel that things are worse than it seems, explained Nick Turner, President of the Vera Institute of Justice, a non -profit organization for defense of criminal judiciary.
This fear can support the support of draconian measures to enforce law, which are highly visible, even if they are not effective. “In our work, we have found that these kinds of politicians may not have a measurable impact on crime for people to like,” Blair told me. “In fact, the more intense people were exposed, the more they liked it.”
Trump has always painted conditions in American cities as worse than them, raised fear to gain political power. The sending of National Guard soldiers to cities, if there is no emergency situation, is legally unjustable. For the cost of the federal government about $ 1 million a day, it is also unsustainable. And when it comes to reduced crime, it will be unsuccessful in the long term.
But as the National Guard soldiers get into more and more American cities, Trump achieves something that no previous US president has ever achieved: inducing militarization of American cities seems normal.
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Mary Ellen Klas is a journalist of Bloomberg’s policy and policy. Former head of the Chief Office for Miami Herald, covered policy and government for more than three decades.
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