President Donald Trump’s approach to the National Guard deployments has caused a flurry of conversations across the board.
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump gave a preamble to the deployments we’re now seeing. Trump said at the time, “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, D.C., and clean it up, renovate it, rebuild our capital city, so there’s no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.”
Trump had also spoken about other places beyond D.C., as shortly after reports came out about the Venezuelan gang that occupied apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, he stated that “These towns have been conquered. We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, kick them out of our country, and we will be very, very effective in doing it.”
The federal actions we’ve seen his administration take so far should not surprise anyone. Trump promised he’d tackle crime, and he’s following through.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with Trump’s actions, it could help to recall that Pew Research reported that 61% of voters found violent crime to be their top issue in the last election. Vera Action, a left-leaning advocacy group, found that “even though crime is declining, perceptions of high crime contributed to the country’s rightward shift—fueled by a massive GOP ad spend on crime and immigration.”
However, it’s high-profile and disturbing cases like Aurora, Colorado, that could help explain why some Americans are so worried about violent crime, despite a 30-year-long downward trend.
While we could debate causes, there’s a more concrete and worthwhile discussion to be had about why more people are paying attention to crime and law enforcement, particularly in Washington, D.C.
On Aug. 25, the White House released a fact sheet that clarifies the President’s position on why he’s deployed the National Guard in our nation’s capital. It states that “Washington, D.C. is under siege from out-of-control violent crime,” and mentions issues ranging from the murder of Israeli embassy staffers, to the shooting of a Congressional intern or the beating of an administration staffer. After 30 days of the deployment, violent crime had dropped by 17%. However, violent crime had already been on a two-year decline in the district, making it more difficult to determine whether the deployment was necessary.
But, the conversation extends beyond the deployment in D.C., as some guardsmen have received orders that have deployed them to cities in states like Illinois, Tennessee and Oregon. However, in the Oregon example, the deployment has been temporarily halted and will likely go up the chain to more judges’ decisions on appeal.
However, the judge who halted the Oregon deployment wrote, “This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs.”
Beyond this judge, lawmakers have also spoken about deployments. Their comments similarly echo a focus on how the Tenth Amendment ensures state sovereignty and the balance of power between the federal and state governments.
Recently, New York Governor Kathy Hochul claimed that Trump is “just trying to throw gasoline on a fire, we don’t need that, we got our own fires under control here, we do not need the federal government telling us what to do.’
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has added that “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he’s causing families.”
Politics aside, it just makes sense why some governors are upset about how the federal government is sidelining their authority; it’s incredibly American to have reservations and dissent when someone tells you to do something, and more so when we’re talking about the federal government.
However, we cannot lose sight of the core of this issue. Crime isn’t strictly political, especially when there are troubling statistics that give reason for why lawmakers need to act.
For instance, the FBI’s crime statistics show that there were more than 14 million criminal offenses last year. The Bureau’s statistics also reinforce that “a violent crime occurred, on average, every 25.9 seconds in 2024.”
While our country did see a decrease in murder, aggravated assault and robbery compared to 2023, we cannot just assume everything is fine without looking more in depth. The problems still exist, especially at the state level.
We shouldn’t need the federal government to step in, especially when it’s up to local leaders to safeguard to ensure their community’s safety.
But problems of crime persist despite efforts at the local level. Cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Memphis, Newark and Chicago have the highest homicide rates in the nation. For Baltimore, it has 15.81 instances of violent crime compared to the national median of four per 1,000 people. St. Louis attributes 76.4 firearm deaths per 100,000 people, according to Axios. For Washington, D.C., I’m even hesitant to draw conclusions about crime rates due to how there are allegations that police have allegedly misclassified and downgraded serious offenses.
The bottom line is that it is ridiculous that we are even having debates about sending the National Guard into cities. There’s right ways to handle crime, and there’s extreme solutions. While the Guard is one option, it should be up to states to govern. If states fail to, then we talk about solutions. This debate also sidesteps others to be had on cost-effective solutions, and ignores where change starts: by electing the right leaders at the local level.
But we cannot lose sight of how former President Ronald Reagan once said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
How you choose to attribute the problem, to either the federal or state governments, is your prerogative. But still, we cannot be negligent and excuse crime in any form, especially when we are better than the problems that we’ve failed to solve.
Michael Duke, GSB ’26, is a business administration major from Scottsdale, Arizona.
