The Real Cost of Ordering Troops Into Cities like Portland

Donald Trump has relentlessly depicted cities as cauldrons of violence and lawlessness abetted by spineless liberals. His endlessly repeated mantra depicts urban crime in the most lurid overblown language: “Violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters.” Immigrants are murderers and child traffickers. These apocalyptic portrayals are true nowhere.

Now there are boots on the ground in Los Angeles, Washington and perhaps Portland by the time you read this. Unfortunately for the Trump Administration, the politicized deployments of armed forces against Americans on American soil is presumably a crime—not a good look—though courts will have to sort that out.

Some in the pundit class are willing to credit the Trump administration if crime actually goes down, but flooding public places with uniformed officers is extremely costly, and of limited value at best, especially when imposed on municipalities rather than in a cooperative partnership with local law enforcement and reflecting the desire of locals.

Creating the perception of rampant crime is a potent political weapon, however destructive it is to targeted communities. Masked and armed troops are a TV-friendly spectacle meant to show that Trump and his minions are “tough on crime.” This is the latest sequel in the “law and order” franchise—not the TV show but the expression deployed as a political tool to bludgeon cities—especially cities run by Democrats.

The rhetoric of urban and immigrant violence dates from the 1960s and presumes that bashing communities, rather than offering solutions, will work at the ballot box. Cities can’t allow this. It damages their economies and dehumanizes their people.

A Sordid History

The violence that wracked southern cities and northern urban centers in the 1960s Civil Rights era was a turning point for cities. Richard Nixon and Republican politicians would invoke images of burning buildings and roving Blacks stealing televisions out of shattered storefronts, stoking fear of a feral Black underclass. They promised restoration of “law and order” in cities they depicted as consumed by chaos and crime.

Their solution was enhanced policing, use of the National Guard to quell unrest, and demands for ever longer prison sentences, even for minor offenses—tactics that were widely questioned even in the 1960s. Nixon would get elected President in part on his tough-on-crime promises, and declare a “war on drugs,” which swept up Black marijuana offenders and only rarely white ones—and failed to quell addiction or crime in cities that were spiraling downward thanks to massive disinvestment.

Cities—and their Black and brown residents—would pay the price for “law and order.” The fear-mongering imagery became a self-fulfilling prophecy as government subsidies for housing, transportation, and other infrastructure were shifted to suburbs. Whites and businesses fled cities in droves, leaving behind empty, vandalized buildings and shuttered industrial plants. In the 1970s and 1980s, some cities would lose a third to half of their population, and many—experts and ordinary people—would come to think of dense cities as irredeemable.

The same rhetoric would reappear over subsequent decades when politically convenient, leading to a further militarization of police, and draconian sentences that put millions of Black men behind bars.

Yet many cities struggled back from the brink in spite of such headwinds. High crime tracks pretty closely with poverty, and cities able to broadly increase wealth gave people hope, made necessary investments possible, and put people to work. Recovering cities saw a virtuous cycle of investment leading to dramatic, persistent reductions in crime, which encouraged greater growth. Washington, D.C., was once a deeply crime-ridden place. Now it is desirable, with prices to match, where serious crime persists mainly in low-income hot spots.

When protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd and other senselessly killed Back men turned violent a few years ago, opportunistic right-wingers returned to the Nixonian playbook. Trump actually increased the scale of violent clashes in Portland by deploying Federal law-enforcement officers against mainly peaceful protestors. He threatened to send Federal forces to other cities, but was deterred by virulent pushback from state and local officials.

Protest violence was in fact limited, but cities did not recognize how powerful this imagery was in inciting visceral fear. Hanging in the tear gas-filled air was the accusation that mayors who did not deploy massive, highly visible police forces to swarm aggressive but legal protests were against . . . “law and order.”

Cities, already coping with pandemic emergencies, did not push back hard enough. Fomenting fear of crime that exaggerated reality crippled cities in their pandemic recovery and induced their companies to look elsewhere.

Much is made of “Democrat-run cities” failing to eliminate crime. In truth, most cities, and urbanizing suburbs (even in deep red Texas) are run by Democrats because Republicans don’t listen, aren’t responsive to these voters, and promulgate anti-urban, anti-professional, and anti-education policies that undercut their success. While the people who live in cities point out substantial drops in crime, the blowtorch rhetoric of Trump and his minions keeps ratcheting up.

A Gallup poll taken at the height of the Trump’s pre-election demonizing of cities found that an unusually low percentage of Democrats found crime to be worsening (29%) while 90% of Republicans perceived more crime. It’s a huge and unique disparity, and it means A) Republicans believed the apocalyptic rhetoric while Democrats rejected it, or B) that crime is rapidly worsening in the exurbs and rural areas where Republicans govern, and safety is rapidly improving in predominantly urban democratic areas. What it does not mean is that blue cities are swarming with criminals. Voters may turn on Republicans that don’t do more to reduce crime.

Undoing Reform

Right wing zealots tore up a fragile consensus that had developed in recent years across the political spectrum to reduce scandalously expensive, at times brazenly racist and life-destroying incarceration of millions of men serving excessively long sentences thanks to “three strikes” laws that all but eliminated judicial discretion.

Behind today’s right-wing sloganeering—to the extent that any specifics are offered— are the same old pledges to return to massive police forces and a resort to long prison sentences that play well on TV but historically decimated communities and lives while largely failing to reduce offending. (Crime continued to decline in New York City after a court ordered an end to its aggressive and heavily resented “stop and frisk” program in minority communities, for example.)

Progressives are cowering in the face of the bullying onslaught, rightfully slammed for “defund the police”—an intentionally provocative slogan that backfired destructively as people watched the justice system seize up and crime rise during the pandemic. Officers quit en masse in cities run by progressives, but they also abandoned well-resourced suburban and rural departments that pretend to respect police.

Police as pawns

Cops are realizing that they are being used as political pawns rather than constructive participants in a well-functioning and politically independent justice system. (The abuse of police in the 2020 invasion of the Capitol luridly displayed the low regard held by the right when enforcement was inconvenient to their cause.)

Now police, national guard troops, and members of the armed forces are being used as props in political vendettas against city leaders who stand up to the administration. It also looks like a consolidation of the armed forces and law enforcement in service to a totalitarian takeover that’s no longer a paranoid fantasy.

But a massive growth in police forces, jails, and prisons will be hard to pull off. ICE recruitment is so anemic that the government is promoting $50,000 signing bonuses. That has produced thousands of new candidates—from local police departments and the military which can’t match that pay. Immigrants who join the National Guard are promised fast-tracked citizenship, as they are tasked with rounding up other immigrants. When will those hires become inconvenient to the would-be king and be purged in turn?

Prisons are overcrowded and underfunded and people are dying in them. Many are already dangerous and ill-prepared to cope with an influx of destabilizing high-needs offenders, such as those with mental-health maladies or who are addicted to drugs. Jails and prisons are likely to see more violence, homicides, and suicides. Severely damaged people released after serving their sentences are likely—at best—to add their numbers to the homeless.

This New York Times story noted that Republican governors have not sought the presence of federal troops even though crime rates in their cities are similar or higher than in Washington. These include Kansas City, St. Louis, Birmingham, three cities in Ohio, and sunbelt cities thought to be thriving, including Nashville, Houston, and Salt Lake City.

Media has paid little attention to the prevalence of crime in Republican exurbs and rural areas, where desperation and easy access to opioids and fentanyl have devastated communities.

Cities are the anti-crime innovators

Cities that innovate in crime prevention have nothing to apologize to the zealots for. They resist the brute-force performance art because they have been there and done that. Its why the innovations that actually reduce offending have been developed in cities—even the ones that host isolated poverty neighborhoods where lack of access to resources breeds desperation, which seeds gangs and violence.

Cities have devised programs to reduce youth offending, thereby undercutting the growth of gangs and their way of turning minor criminals into hardened ones. Some nonprofits focus on helping aimless children lacking mentors to stay in school. “Violence interruptors” are credible messengers to otherwise unpersudable young people because they can speak from their own experiences in gangs and prison. They teach young men how to de-escalate conflicts rather than resort to violence. Other programs reduce the allure of guns.

All of these programs are shown to work in concert with conventional policing. They work even better when stable housing is available, when schools are well resourced and effective, and when health care (especially mental healthcare) is available. Congress, embarrassed by the prevalence of homeless veterans, poured money into housing them, and the numbers of veterans who live in distress on the street has dramatically decreased.

The federal government has aided some of these efforts but to no one’s surprise the programs have been cut under Trump. Washington could play a constructive role by helping fund these basics and helping to spread best practices. Many of these innovations were supported across the political spectrum before the opportunistic ideologues saw that the old-fashioned “law and order” rhetoric (which is increasingly neither) tested well in focus groups.

Growing wealth and opportunity has proven to be the best crime-reduction strategy. States and the federal government have too often gotten in the way. (Tennessee’s legislature is the most lurid example, undercutting newly thriving, fast-growing Nashville at every turn. It tried to halve its governing council and tried to throw out city legislators who pushed gun-safety legislation after mass shootings. Nashville is responsible for 40 percent of Tennessee’s GDP but try telling that to power-grabbing legislators.)

“Courts do harm”

By focusing entirely on enforcement, The Trump Administration misses the fact that the justice system isn’t set up to deal with the kind of street crime that people most fear, concluded a public defender in Seattle, Lisa Daugaard, who is the co-director of policy at the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action (PDA). “The most commonly charged felony crime is drugs, usually low-level possession and dealing,” Daugaard explained to me in an interview. She founded Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), a program of intensive case management that addresses not just addiction or offending but the drivers of such behavior.

Diversion into intensely managed programs that address substance abuse and trauma related to domestic abuse, avoids the cycle of arrest, charges, and detention or prison for people with mental-health maladies that often intertwine with substance abuse, and who may be homeless. It is a widely admired program that has gone national.

Police can do empathetic outreach, she says, but “I don’t think you can convert courts to being helpful to peoples’ recovery,” adding, “It raises the deepest questions about the enormous superstructure of lawyers who exist far from the reality of the street.” LEAD tries to keep people out of the justice system because, she says, “It does harm,” an assessment shared by many crime-reduction groups. Recovery and change are not possible in jails or in a probation and court system that is “traumatizing and disruptive and not clinically competent in how people recover.” She adds, “It’s also very expensive.”

Understanding that fear mongering is effective with voters, urban leaders need to focus on meeting peoples’ concerns and helping them understand the effectiveness of these alternatives to militarized law enforcement.

They should emphasize:

• Keeping kids in schools that understand their needs undercuts the pipeline to crime
• Violence interruptors teaching de-escalation (to youth and police) reduces violent encounters
• Programs that successfully reduce drug use and address substance abuse reduce crime
• Successfully addressing street homelessness reduces the sense of disorder that drives fear of crime and enables crime
• Diverting drug, homeless, and trauma offenders from a court system that can only mete out punishment is more effective at lower cost

None of this is enough for the bellicose ideologues lobbing rhetorical bombs from their comfortable country clubs. One called urban crime-prevention programs “milquetoast promises” and “toothless social programs,” while offering no specifics about why they don’t work. The far right swoons over the macho posturing and performative militarized policing. But the country needs to do better than return to a past that wasted too many billions and ruined too many lives to too little effect.