Photo: National Guard troops alongside DC police officers following Trump’s takeover of the city’s law enforcement
Amidst a flurry of half-truths, distortions and lies, Donald Trump has taken over the Washington D.C. police department, deployed the military to the nation’s Capital and threatened to put troops in the streets of multiple other major cities. Memphis, Tennessee is next in line for a National Guard-backed takeover. Trump has made “cracking down on crime,” a centerpiece of his political appeal – but do these federal invasions really have anything to do with public safety?
The stated justification for the administration’s deployments is that there is a major crime wave sweeping the country and that deploying more police and soldiers, alongside “tougher” penalties, will subdue the alleged crime wave.
Trump’s bluster is primarily focused on heavily Black cities in states with Democratic governors. He rails about Chicago, but fails to note that Chicago has, according to the FBI, a lower violent crime rate than Pasadena, Texas, which has a Republican mayor. Trump ignores that Miami’s Republican Mayor presides over a higher stated rate of violent crime than Austin, Texas, a city well-identified with progressive politics. All that makes Trump’s real purpose clear: associating Black political power specifically, and the Black liberation movement broadly, with rampant criminality.
The Black freedom movement has always stressed the “social roots” of crime in capitalist deprivation. Targeting Black cities, where the political discourse on crime is influenced by movements demanding attention to “root causes,” is part of the blunt force trauma assault on the working class being waged by the White House. Expanding and synergizing police forces, the military and the prison system is a containment strategy to contain the anti-social fallout of the destruction of working class lives and the actual and potential possibilities of mass rebellion that run deep in Black working class communities.
Comparing Trump’s rhetoric to the real facts makes it clear that the injustices of the system we live under are the real drivers of crime. To make our communities actually safe, that system must be uprooted.
The numbers game
Trump’s approach rests on two assumptions: that increasing the number of police overall and imposing more punitive sentences will decrease and deter crime. Ostensibly, then, the data should reflect that having more cops means lower crime.
Yet, the top ten cities in terms of police officers per capita have drastically different “crime rates” as measured by the FBI. Washington D.C. has more cops per 100,000 people than New York, Boston, and Las Vegas, for instance, but also higher rates of violent crime. D.C. and San Francisco spend about the same, per person, on policing, yet have substantially different rates of violent and property crime as measured by the FBI.
In Philadelphia, homicides have been dropping precipitously, even though the police department claims to be “understaffed.” One study of policing in California noted that between 1990 and 2023 law enforcement funding increased 46%, and the number of police went up by 129%, yet departments across the state solved fewer crimes over the same period, a decrease of 41%.
Even in one study designed to show that more cops reduces homicides, the authors note their findings don’t hold true for “cities with the largest populations of Black people,” the exact cities being targeted by Trump. With the further observation that “adding more police officers…means more people getting arrested for petty, low-level, victimless crimes…Black people are disproportionately the target…saddling them with crippling court fees and forcing many…into the criminal justice system.” 74% of all jail bookings are for non-violent offenses, the plurality being “public order” offenses like: “disorderly conduct, loitering, and public intoxication.” Black people account for 32% of jail bookings, but only 14% of the population.
Similar trends hold true for incarceration. Over 20 countries experienced similar rises and falls in crime in the past several decades. Yet none of those countries increased imprisonment as massively as the United States. One study looking at the landscape post-2000 found that, after the turn of the century “mass incarceration appears to have made almost no contribution to the crime drop.”
The National Research Council summarized the existing research about the relationship between mass incarceration and crime reduction by noting that the “magnitude of the reduction is highly uncertain and the results of most studies suggest it was unlikely to have been large.”
Cause and effect
Trump, and other “law and order” devotees also approach “crime” as if it has no real causes and thus can only be addressed with more military (police) force on the streets. “Crime” however is not random, and is deeply related to the social chaos caused by capitalism.
Roughly 40% of those arrested were not working in the three months prior. This comports with dozens of studies that have found “a positive relationship between unemployment and crime.” Even more, “working-age people in prison were making less than $20,000 per year on average” before their arrest, which was “40% less than similar non-incarcerated people.” Just over one-fifth of all those arrested “were experiencing housing instability or homelessness” as well.
State prison populations clearly reflect that the incarcerated have been affected by family disruption, poverty and educational exclusion. A full 62% of those incarcerated at the state-level, for example, did not complete high school. Relatedly, 68% had previously been arrested at a young age and a plurality were living in impoverished families as young people. Notably, one-third also had an incarcerated parent. Parents thrown in jail tend to provide 50% or more of a family income prior to being arrested.
Further, “boys born into families at the bottom 10% of the income distribution are 20 times more likely to experience prison in their 30s than their peers born into the top 10%.” All-in-all, it’s clear that militarized policing and mass incarceration are responses, not solutions, to the fall out from an economy organized to prioritize high profits over decent wages, benefits and living conditions.
Real solutions
The relationship between capitalist disruption of working class communities and crime, likely explains why non-police methods of addressing the issue show significant success. In Chicago Public Schools, simply providing more robust therapy and counseling options reduced violent crime arrests among students by 20%. “Violence interruption,” where community-rooted teams use an array of non-prison/police based interventions has seen significant success.
These types of policies are widely credited for a 64% drop in homicides in Newark. In cities like Baltimore, Charlotte, St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Kansas City and Chicago, similar efforts have resulted in 30-75% reductions in shootings and murders. Notably, Trump has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funds slated for programs like these around the country.
Trump’s real goal: racist social control, not crime prevention
Clearly, Trump’s “law and order” campaign is not really about crime prevention. It is a political response to the social chaos of capitalism. Trump’s policies are eroding the purchasing power of workers wages, pushing them to rely on more unpredictable forms of compensation, with fewer health and safety protections. He is also sinking more money into a trillion-dollar war machine while making healthcare more expensive, slashing food stamps, starving public schools of funds, and making it harder for working class kids to attend college.
These, and other policies, are guaranteed to increase misery and discontent among the working class. This creates a need for the ruling class to strengthen its ability to control the masses of people. Whether it is “crime,” or protests, or strikes, the goal of the police state is to contain, not solve, the social turmoil caused by capitalist oppression.
Even more, Trump has nothing to say about rampant criminality amidst the ruling class. Bosses, for instance, steal more wages from workers – $50 billion worth – than all other forms of theft combined. The Trump administration is proposing nothing to address this. Relatedly, the White House has taken affirmative steps to loosen restrictions on corporate bribery.
All of this goes to show that public safety can’t be dealt with outside of the context of the system that creates economic and social insecurity. Real safety will remain an illusion without a massive redistribution of wealth and power – in other words, without socialism.
