Push too hard, expect people to push back. I think the Trump administration is hoping for it, hoping sending Federalized National Guard troops into big cities will create an incident leading to riots that will justify even harsher measures. And yes, big cities are crime-ridden; they always have been -- but the rate has been falling dramatically over the last decade in every one of the cities the President has sent or is talking about sending troops into: a lot of people in close proximity is always going to be a hunting ground for the criminally inclined and as a society, the U.S. has been doing an amazing job of getting it under control, using everything from community policing to outreach programs, mandatory sentencing laws and getting the lead out of gasoline.
This reality, which you can go look up for yourself, doesn't serve an agenda based on urbaphobia and anecdote; it doesn't serve the desire to test limits -- and cause reaction. Remember the chaos of the first Trump administration? He loved it, or at least the opportunities it provided, and he's going to get himself more of it, one way or another. Count on it.
Chicago, Illinois seems to be his next target. That city and state has a pretty good chance of litigating the effort to a standstill, but it won't stop there.
He isn't poking the bear to provoke riots to excuse some future powergrab.
ReplyDeleteHe's going to show people in these big, blue cities that order and safety can be restored. He's going to show the voting public that the Democratic leadership in these States and cities have been negligent and ineffective for decades.
He's going to erode Democrat support.
I published your comment as an example of the staggering levels of self-delusion to be found among Trumpist Republicans.
DeleteAs I mentioned, and as can easily be found from numerous reliable sources -- including, the last time I checked, the FBI -- crime in large U. S. cities has been trending down for over a decade, with some wobbles through the pandemic. "Order and safety" already exist there. Is the crime rate generally higher there than in Bugtussle(Pop. 43)? Yes, in part because small towns don't present as many opportunities for crime; that's always been true and it always will be. But this claim that our biggest cities are crime-ridden hellholes is nonsense, and one example is an embarrassing one: the much smaller "big cities" in the states that have sent National Guard troops to DC is higher than in our nation's capitol. Here's one article about it. There's another at CNN but it's paywalled. Or you could look up the crime rates for yourself.
If we take murder as a proxy for violent crime, Baltimore is #4, 58/100K, Chicago is #22, at 17/100K (and behind #15 Indianapolis, at 20/100K) and New York is #127, at 4/100K. I have rounded to the nearest whole number. You will find the table here, and choosing a different proxy -- robbery, for instance -- gets slightly different ranking, but it's still not the claimed huge disparity between big cities and smaller ones, or between Republican-majority cities and Democrat-majority cities.
Washington, DC clocks in at #10, behind Birmingham, Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, Kansas City and Shreveport, none of which seem to be getting Federalized Guard troops sent in.
Our crime rates run 10X or higher than the rates of the capitol cities of most EU nations. Some of that may be due to differences in reporting -- solved cases vs. all cases being the most common mismatch.
This is dogwhistle theater. The common denominator is that the cities President Trump has sent troops into or is talking about sending troops into (on the very thin pretext of a claimed emergency) is that the Mayors are African-American, and most of them are women.
(Bit of a glitch: the crime rate in many of the much smaller "big cities" in states that have sent troops is higher than the rate in Washington DC, etc.)
ReplyDeleteThe rates for rape are highest in Anchorage (161/100K) and Salt Lake City (158/100K). Neither of those would be considered liberal enclaves. Perhaps it's not fair to connect those dots to Trump's treatment of women, but I'm putting fresh chalk in the chalk line.
DeleteAnd as Anon celebrates the Administration's trampling of Posse Comitatus, Trump fires a shell directly into the Fed. Monday night futures of the stock market are tumbling, and I'd bet the market's Chief Manipulator had his short sales all neat and tidy before firing Fed Governor Cook for allegedly lying on a mortgage application. What was Trump being prosecuted by New York about? Oh, yeah...lying on a loan application.
ReplyDelete