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crime
Fighting Crime Is a Pretext; Trump Wants Control
The deployment of out-of-state troops to occupy cities cannot plausibly promote public order. It’s blunt force, a brutal power grab, and it runs afoul of the Constitution and the proper role for states.
Sep 02, 2025
US President Donald Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago to “straighten that one out.” New York City, he says, might be next.
Already, armed National Guard regiments are patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. All this on top of the deployment of troops to Los Angeles earlier in the summer.
The deployment of out-of-state troops to occupy cities cannot plausibly promote public order. It’s blunt force, a brutal power grab. It runs afoul of the Constitution and the proper role for states.
I write history books and consider myself an expert on the presidency. I can think of few analogies—not in this country, anyway—for such a move by a chief executive.
Why is this particular turn so alarming? After all, public safety is important, and fighting crime is a worthy goal. My colleague Liza Goitein explains the legal and constitutional issues:
Trump is on even thinner legal ice with this plan than he is in Los Angeles and DC. Unlike in the capital, the president doesn’t command the Illinois National Guard unless he calls them into federal service (i.e., “federalizes” them). There are various laws that authorize him to federalize the guard, but none of them would apply here.
In Los Angeles, Trump is relying on a law (Section 12406 of Title 10 of the US Code) that authorizes federalization when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States,” meaning federal law. Immigration law is federal law. Trump claimed that the protests rendered him “unable... to execute” ICE raids. Although dozens of raids happened during the protests and the administration did not cite a single raid that was thwarted, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deferred to Trump’s assessment.
But that law simply wouldn’t apply to the type of crime Trump has cited in Chicago—essentially, violent street crime. The laws that are implicated are largely those of Illinois and Chicago, not the “laws of the United States.”
Even under the Insurrection Act—which is the main exception to the law barring deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement—the president may deploy troops to execute the law only in situations involving either federal laws or those state laws designed to protect the constitutional rights of classes of people (basically, civil rights laws).
Nor can Trump ask other states’ governors to send their guard forces into Chicago, as he did in DC under a law known as Section 502(f), which authorizes governors to voluntarily use their guard forces for missions requested by the president or secretary of defense. Under this law, presidents have asked governors to deploy guard forces within their own states, in other states that consent, or (as only Trump has done) in DC without local consent. No governor has sent guard troops into another state that did not consent, as would be the case here. That’s because guard forces deployed under this law remain state officers as a legal matter. And under the Constitution, states are sovereign entities vis-à-vis one another. That means one state cannot invade another, even at the president’s request.
If the president wants to send one state’s National Guard forces into an unwilling state, he must federalize them first. But to federalize them, he needs statutory authority. And there is no statutory authority to federalize the guard to police local crime.
The Pentagon reportedly sees its planned military deployment in Chicago as a model for other cities. And of course, the other cities Trump has name-checked in this context are governed by Democrats: Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland.
Flooding “blue” cities with soldiers on the pretext of fighting crime would be an unprecedented abuse of power that would violate states’ rights and threaten our most fundamental liberties. The plan is profoundly un-American. And it is illegal.
Public safety matters greatly. But facts belie the (ever shifting) rationale. New York, for example, remains one of the nation’s safest large cities. As Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday, crime has dropped dramatically, even this year. Fighting crime is not a rationale—it’s a pretext.
The cities targeted so far have two things in common: a Black mayor and a fusillade of presidential rhetoric denouncing them as “hellholes.”
Bill Kristol, founder of The Bulwark and a longtime prominent Republican, surveyed events and put it this way: “What we are seeing is not merely a ‘slide toward authoritarianism.’ It’s a march toward despotism. And it’s a march whose pace is accelerating.”
What can be done to push back? Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker warned federal forces: “Do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” Trump, in turn, mused: “They say... ‘He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” He added, “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.” (As presidential quotations go, it’s about as reassuring as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”)
Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul can play pivotal roles. States and cities can go to court—an epic legal battle. They can rally the public in their states and around the country. They can monitor and document the conduct of deployed forces.
We must all speak out when our Constitution is under threat.
Hopefully you got some rest this Labor Day. It’s going to be a busy fall.
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Crime and Punishment US Style: an Interview with David Garland
The author and NYU professor explains why America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations.
Aug 28, 2025
The United States is a global outlier in several significant areas, not least of which is its extraordinary penal state with its penchant for extreme punitiveness.
Indeed, as Professor David Garland, one of the world’s most influential criminologists, argues in the interview that follows, for historical parallels with the penal state in the US one must look to the case of the Gulag system during Joseph Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Professor Garland contents that behind the harshness and cruelty of the US criminal legal system lies the nation’s racialized political economy, and that transforming the latter is a prerequisite for restructuring the former.
David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt professor of law and professor of sociology at New York University and an honorary professor at Edinburgh University. He is author of the newly published book Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment.
C. J. Polychroniou: The United States has long portrayed itself as the greatest and freest country in the world, a model democracy for other countries across the globe. The reality, however, is that the US is the most economically unequal society in the developed world and one of the worst countries for racial equality. In addition, its weak and fragile liberal-democratic institutions have been exposed in recent times for all to see, while its penal system is what may easily be described as a national disgrace and an international embarrassment. Indeed, as you argue in your recently published book Law and Order Leviathan, the US is also an outlier among modern democracies in its policing and punishment practices, and this is indeed by no means a new phenomenon. How should we understand the country’s long-standing obsession with law and order?
David Garland: Yes, people think of America as Alexis de Tocqueville’s civil society when in fact it’s often closer to Thomas Hobbes’ authoritarian state. We see these repressive characteristics today in the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but for the last 40 years the leading example has been the massive deployment of penal power by America’s criminal legal system—a deployment that has occurred at every level of government with broad bipartisan support.
The fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations. American police kill civilians at a much higher rate; American courts impose longer and more frequent prison sentences; American prisons house massively more individuals, particularly Blacks and Latinos; and Americans with felony convictions are subject to many more controls and constraints after they serve their sentence. No other democracy exercises penal power to this extent. To find historical parallels, we have to look to the Soviet gulags or Mao’s political prison system.
There are many causes that converged to bring about America’s penal Leviathan—fear of crime, racism, neoliberalism, the appeal of law and order politics, a culture of cruelty and indifference—but the fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
C. J. Polychroniou: The US has a weak welfare system and a distinct political economy in general compared to many European countries. Is there a direct link between weak welfare structures and the employment of aggressive policing and harsh punishment?
David Garland: Yes, and the book shows in detail what these linkages are and how they operate. Like its penal state, America’s political economy is an international outlier, with characteristics that set it apart from the economic arrangements of other high-income nations. This is especially true of its labor market—which provides fewer protections for working people, and more low-paid, precarious employment, making for a level of insecurity and instability that is unknown elsewhere in the developed world. On top of this, America’s welfare state provides less support for poor people and for those in need.
Material conditions for working people grew worse after the 1960s when the economic dislocations of deindustrialization were exacerbated by the collapse of the New Deal order, the decline of trade unions, and federal government’s abandonment of the inner cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, America exhibited social-problem levels markedly higher than other developed nations, the most striking of which was a rate of lethal violence—mostly gun homicides—that was off-the-charts high compared to other affluent countries.
The outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed.
Drawing on urban studies and the sociology of violence, I show how pressures produced by America’s political economy—unemployment, disinvestment, deteriorating housing, limited social services, and so on—destabilize poor neighborhoods, undermining community life and family functioning, especially in racially segregated areas with concentrated poverty and population turnover. The result is that the vital processes of socialization, social integration, and informal social control normally carried out by families, schools, neighbors, and employers grow weak and fail, leading to social problems, social disorder, and criminal violence. These problems are deepened by the widespread availability of guns—another exceptional feature of the American landscape.
When homicides and armed robbery rates rose, and cities became disorderly and unsafe, voters demanded that something be done to improve public safety and protect their businesses and property values. But the same political economy that disorganized communities and triggered criminogenic processes also limited the governmental responses to these problems. In America’s racialized ultra-liberal political economy, redistributive policies are generally unpopular. And because responsibility for public safety is, in the US, a local function, few municipalities had the resources needed to respond to crime using the social policies and economic investments that are common in social democratic nations. Instead, they defaulted to the cheap policy instruments that were within their toolkit, namely police and punishment.
Moreover, American-style policing and punishment turns out to be remarkably aggressive. Why? Because of public indifference to the fate of those caught up in the carceral net; because the courts refuse to hold police and prisons to account; but mainly because penal state agents operate against a social background that is more disorganized, more dangerous, and more gun-laden than that of any other developed nation.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out in your book, public sentiments about police brutality, mass incarceration, and the penal state experienced a major shift away from punitive measures following the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Indeed, as street protests ensued, the tenets of police and prison abolition gained currency, although alternatives still needed to be worked out. Be that as it may, the politics of law and order have since returned with a vengeance, as evidenced by the reelection of US President Donald Trump, who ran a campaign based on fear and anxiety. How do we explain this reversal?
David Garland: The plague year of 2020 was an extraordinary time, during which public anxiety and hopes for radical change often coexisted. (During the pandemic, the US created a pop-up European-style welfare state, with stimulus checks for every household; enhanced unemployment, housing, and child-allowance benefits; and massively extended healthcare coverage—only to dismantle it once the crisis had passed.) In retrospect, we can see that the massive street demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd were possible because so many people were no longer at work or in school, making them available to join in the protests. Of course, many Americans were genuinely shocked by the brazen violence and racist disregard for human life that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin displayed. But it is worth remembering, that by 2020, homicide levels and crime rates in general had been falling for more than a decade, relaxing public demands for tough-on-crime policies and enabling activists, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and local groups of abolitionists, to draw public attention to the pathologies of police violence, mass incarceration, and racialized criminal justice.
Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides.
In general, though, the American public is very conservative on matters of crime control and public safety, and demands for the “abolition” or “defunding” of police and prisons were never liable to have much traction beyond the world of activists, advocates, and academics—even when the liberal media briefly introduced these ideas into the mainstream. And while the life chances of middle-class white people are not normally affected by police violence or harsh prison sentences—in sharp contrast to poor communities of color—they are affected by crime and violence. So when, in the fall of 2020, there were reports of an uptick in shootings and homicides, public support drained away from Black Lives Matter and voters reverted to their long-standing preference for law-and-order candidates—as we saw in the election of Eric Adams to NYC Mayor, in the deselection of several progressive prosecutors, and eventually in the victory of Donald Trump. So the reversal was a political regression to the mean following an extraordinary historic moment.
However, I believe the protests of 2020, and the radical critique of the penal state that accompanied them, have changed the public discourse in important ways, introducing new ideas and radicalizing many young people who form part of the Democratic Party base. My hope is that this new level of concern about penal state repression will be joined with realistic, progressive proposals for dealing with crime and disorder. Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides. The emphasis should be on non-penal crime-control measures such as situational crime prevention; designing public spaces to make them safer; improving police training and effectiveness; relieving police of tasks for which they are not suited; enabling communities and not-for-profits to launch crime-reduction initiatives; supporting victims to reduce the likelihood of revictimization; and so on. Crime and disorder are real problems for working people; and the victims of homicide and assaults are most often poor and Black. Sustainable reform of the penal state must go hand in hand with effective crime control.
C. J. Polychroniou: What realistic possibilities are available to us for bringing about penal change if we do not first succeed in restructuring the political economy of the United States?
David Garland: To be clear, the outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed. It is that peculiar political economy that makes American violence, policing, and punishment so extreme compared to other affluent nations. However, there is a range—I call it a “bandwidth”—of possible variation within which American crime, policing, and punishment can be changed: a structurally determined floor and ceiling between which lies the possibility of significant reform. That bandwidth of variation is a key part of the theoretical analysis set out in the book, and an empirical fact confirmed by recent developments.
Criminogenic processes and crime control policies are loosely coupled with political economy, not mechanically and directly determined by it. Crime-control policies can be altered, criminogenic processes interrupted, community work activated without any alternation in larger socioeconomic arrangements. For those hoping to bring about penal change, the existence of this relative autonomy is vitally important. It means that even if Nordic or Western European levels remain out of reach, there is nevertheless the real possibility of life-altering improvements in policing, punishment, and public safety.
There is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
We know this because the last few decades have witnessed many instances of significant change. Over the last 20 years, the nation’s imprisonment rates declined from a high point of 765 per 100,000 to a new level closer to 600 per 100,000. Between 1995 and 2020 the nation’s annual homicide rate declined from around 10 murders for every 100,000 people to 5 per 100,000. Shootings of civilians by the New York Police Department (NYPD) dropped dramatically—from an average of 62 people shot and killed each year in the early 1970s to an average of nine per year between 2015 and 2021—after new forms of training, guidelines, and accountability were introduced. The NYPD also reduced its deployment of stop and frisk from over 680,000 per year in 2011 to 11,000 in 2018—the result of a court ruling not a social transformation. Between 1997 and 2023, 2 million formerly incarcerated people regained the right to vote, thanks to campaigns against felon disfranchisement. And since 2000, the imprisonment rate for Black men has fallen by almost half, thanks in large part to the scaling back the war on drugs.
Each of these changes was significant, even radical, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people. Together, they amount to an empirical demonstration of the book’s theoretical claim that there is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
Nevertheless, the gravitational force exerted by structural arrangements—and the powerful interests that support them—is, in the final analysis, ineluctable. America’s political economy sets definite limits to what can be achieved and imposes upper bounds on what is possible. Until its structures are transformed, America’s penal state will continue to impose a level of punishment and control that has no equivalent in the developed world.
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When Trump Rails Against DC Crime, the Call Is Coming From Inside the House
Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in DC, luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes?
Aug 23, 2025
US President Donald Trump, always looking to distract attention from his many crimes, has deployed National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officials in Washington, DC. After his usual wild exaggerations about “…violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youths, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” he moves to impose what is becoming his police state over an overwhelmingly Democratic city
As Trump’s troops fan out across more of the city, they are told to be aggressive, take credit for arrests made by the local DC police force, and arbitrarily interrogate DC residents, for example, people waiting at bus stops, minding their own business.
Trump, during his first and current terms, rarely stepped out of his limousine to see what DC is like (See James Fallows’ article “What It Actually ‘Feels Like’ in DC” August 13, 2025). He finally visited with a cluster of his police and troops yesterday, passing out “cheeseburgers prepared by the White House chef’s staff and around 100 pizzas from Wiseguy Pizza,” and quickly declared Washington a safer city after less than two weeks of his forces patrolling largely tourist and downtown business areas.
The reaction from DC residents is mostly negative. Business is already slowing for DC restaurants and will only get worse as Trump brings in more National Guard troops from Republican states, paid for by the taxpayers.
Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets?
Homicides in DC are at a 30-year low. They are far lower than in many cities in the red states headed by white mayors. Trump seems to go after cities that happen to have Black mayors, further illustrating his racist bigotry, along with downplaying slavery and reinstalling Confederate statues and returning Confederate names to military bases.
To be sure, there ARE two grave and deadly ongoing crime waves in DC. One is clearly the violence surging from Trump’s White House, with big weapons and big tax dollars to fund and shield mega-terrorist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughtering genocide of civilians in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank.
Trump has continued the “co-belligerency” that former President Joe Biden established with the Israeli regime. Every day, far more babies, children, mothers, and fathers have been killed from this brutal Trump-Netanyahu axis than are killed in a year in DC.
The deliberate cutoff of lifesaving medical, food, and water assistance to millions of the impoverished in less developed countries occurred when Trump illegally closed the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Humanitarian relief groups already count the preventable deaths in the many thousands. Cutting off food and vaccines will have devastating long-term consequences.
Domestically, convicted felon Trump openly violates many criminal statutes and constitutional provisions (See the April 30, 2025, letter to President Trump citing 22 Impeachable Offenses). For example, he daily violates the Anti-Deficiency Act by spending large sums of money NOT appropriated by Congress. He violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal property for electoral campaign purposes. (See the June 28, 2023, letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland by me and Bruce Fein.) He glories in obstruction of justice—a felony. His former first-term national security adviser, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir that “obstruction of justice was a way of life at the White House.”
Trump is continuing this offense in his second term with vengeance. He engages in flat-out open extortion in dealing with universities and several large corporate law firms. The list goes on. Recall that Trump said in 2019 that “with Article II, I can do whatever I want as President” and has repeatedly declared that he has never done anything wrong in elective office. It is understandable that scores of psychologists have described him as a dangerous and delusional personality. The worst is yet to come from the egomaniacal Trump.
As for the K Street offices of hundreds of corporate lobbyists, where does one start? They are, along with heaping piles of campaign cash, making sure that neither Congress nor government agencies of the Executive Branch stop the corporate crime wave. The Big Business paymasters spend whatever it takes to ensure that crime in the suites is never aggressively prosecuted.
Read the weekly Corporate Crime Reporter? (Give your library a gift subscription.) For 39 years, it has been reporting documented corporate crimes of violence (toxic pollution, dangerous products, workplace casualties), and economic crimes and thefts from workers, consumers, investors, students, and pensioners.
Imagine the mainstream media reports on more corporate crimes than budget-starved law enforcement can begin to prosecute. Check out “60 Minutes,” the New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, and even the Wall Street Journal. For enjoyable, factual reading, try the books by Jim Hightower and his regular newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
Hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths occur annually from these violations, and the preventable injuries and illnesses are much larger in number.
Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in DC, luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes? Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets? To ask is to answer. Power, money, and greed camouflage the corporate criminal deeds from journalists who do not or are not allowed to see them in plain sight.
We have a political economy steeped in self-deception, taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat and not making the lethal corrosions on peace and justice serious campaign issues in elections. Voters, of course, can end this cowardly silence.
Who will be the first reporter to ask Trump in his many informal gatherings with the press, about these two booming crime scenes representing the Oligarchy and the Plutocracy?
When will the reporters and their editors stop wallowing in a cultural rut where common candor requires uncommon courage?
Remember, it’s all in plain sight to behold and then be told.
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