Why You Must Reject Trump’s Tough On Crime Approach As A Failed Strategy of the Past

As the U.S. experiences the lowest violent crime rate in over 50 years, the Trump administration is building a public case for mobilizing the National Guard to address “out of control” crime in major cities.

The first target of this effort has been Washington, DC. Despite the fact that the city has hit a 30-year low in violent crime and that sharply declining numbers of residents feel that crime is a serious problem, the administration has activated over 2,000 National Guard troops to the city, a move overwhelmingly opposed by the DC public. In an additional rich bit of irony, the governor of Mississippi—the state with the highest homicide rate in the country—announced the deployment of 200 his National Guard members to DC to help “return law and order to our nation’s capital.” Since then, President Trump has mentioned a list of additional major Black-led cities that he may target as well: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and my own city of Oakland.

This type of buffoonery and grandstanding related to violent crime is nothing new in our country. In fact, both sides of the political aisle have engaged in various forms of fear-mongering in order to militarize police forces, pass overly punitive and ineffective crime bills, and of course, win elections. In 1989,

Donald Trump famously took out a full-page ad in several newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York in response to the case of the Central Park 5, a group of Black and Latino teenage boys who were falsely accused of raping and murdering a White woman: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them. I am looking to punish them. If the punishment is strong, the attacks on innocent people will stop.” Just a few years later, in 1996, Hillary Clinton spoke in defense of her husband’s now notorious crime bill: “They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

For almost 30 years, I’ve labored alongside a large network of faith leaders, community organizers, and policy experts working to confront the criminalization of people of color, particularly Black men and boys. As a Black man born and raised in a working-class family in San Francisco, I not only endured the violence and desperation of the crack epidemic of the 80s and 90s, but the “tough on crime” battle cry of prosecutors, police, and politicians that accompanied it. Luckier than many of my peers, I escaped both death and incarceration, though even being a law-abiding college student and youth pastor did not protect me from indiscriminate violence at the hands of the police in my early 20s.

Now, as a pastor and leader of a national civil rights organization dedicated to reducing gun violence and mass incarceration, one of the most emotionally devastating dimensions of the mass criminalization of Black America has been the complicity of my own people. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Locking Up Our Own,” legal scholar James Forman, Jr. describes the ways that Black politicians, judges, police, and prosecutors helped usher along Black criminalization during the post-Civil Rights era. Even when part of well-intentioned efforts to bring safety to ravaged neighborhoods, many Black leaders have resorted to the same type of dehumanizing rhetoric and policies promoted by their white peers. Foreman recounts how a Black mayor in the 1980s told reporters that he wanted his police to go after murder suspects and “hunt them down like mad dogs” and, in response to a rising homicide rate, how a Black councilwoman asked then-President Reagan to declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard to her city.

As a pastor, I’ve had to bury more young Black people than I care to remember. I’ve had to council and comfort countless grieving mothers, have been the victim of break-ins and robberies, and often fret over the safety of my daughters. I’m not naïve to the toll that crime and violence take in cities like Oakland where I live.

That said, we do ourselves no favors by fearing our young people or resorting to oppressive and militaristic law enforcement policies—especially now that we’ve had decades of experience with redemptive and life-giving public safety strategies that work. Here in Oakland, we had six straight years of reduced shootings that culminated in the second-lowest lowest homicide rate in almost 50 years using a combination of targeted policing and community violence intervention strategies. As the city began to water down the approach in 2019, shootings began to increase again until city leaders reset the strategy in 2024 and shootings began another sharp decline.

Over the last several years, there’s been an encouraging expansion of the use of community violence intervention strategies throughout the country. While still woefully underfunded, these initiatives utilize community members to interrupt shootings and provide critical services to those at highest risk for violence and have helped fuel the national crime reductions that we’ve seen over the last several years.

Some cities have also begun using public health approaches to addressing drug use, homelessness, and mental health crises which are both more humane and more cost effective than prosecution and incarceration. Though not as politically sexy as the “lock ‘em up” rhetoric, community-based strategies work. After examining 264 cities over more than 20 years, sociologist Patrick Sharkey found that, for every 10 local nonprofit organizations focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities, there was a 9% reduction in the murder rate.

All of this to say, we collectively know much more about how to reduce violence than we did 40 years ago and there is no compelling rationale for repeating the same knee-jerk responses that have removed millions of Black men and women from their homes and traumatized generations of Black families. In fact, this knowledge and experience will be particularly critical as we prepare for the devastating impact on the millions of poor families who will lose Medicaid and SNAP benefits in the coming years thanks tothe so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

Unfortunately, despite these lessons, the tough-on-crime rhetoric persists, even among too many Black pastors, politicians, and middle-class professionals. Even with all the research and data that has been amassed related to community-based solutions for reducing violence and crime, it is still maddeningly difficult to convince most mayors—including Black mayors—to make substantive investments in research-based programs. Part of the problem is that, when it comes to public safety, most mayors rely almost exclusively on their police chiefs for advice and are not inclined to listen to crime survivors, the formerly incarcerated, young people, or for that matter, criminologists, on what can be done to build safe and peaceful communities.

There is no overnight fix to violence in our cities, any more than there is an overnight fix to predatory capitalism or anti-black racism. True and enduring community safety requires what has been done the past two decades: persistent partnership, public health approaches and funding. No one wants to live in safe and secure communities more than systems impacted families. We don’t have to try failed policies of the past to achieve peace in our time. Reject Trump’s false fix. And embrace a self determined and long journey to safety and justice that will last.