When President Donald Trump began ramping up talk of a federal crackdown on urban crime, the cities he mentioned as targets early on were in solidly Democratic bastions: Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, and Washington. What he didn’t mention was that many of the top 10 cities with high homicide rates are in Republican-led states.
The latest plot twists in a national reckoning on violent crime offer a reminder of how the issue’s complexity defies political sound bites.
A highly publicized subway killing put Charlotte, a city in politically purple North Carolina, in the spotlight around public safety. Solid-red Utah was the scene of the political assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which has shaken the nation. And Republican-led Tennessee is home to two cities ranked in the country’s top 20 for violent crime among large cities with populations of 500,000 or higher.
Why We Wrote This
Republicans say crime rates justify National Guard rollouts to Democrat-led cities like Memphis. But many higher-crime cities are in Republican-led states, a reminder that crime’s causes – and solutions – are complex.
Memphis, where President Trump is now ordering National Guard troops at the request of Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee, has the highest rates of both homicides and all violent crime among those large cities.
In many ways, this Democratic city exemplifies the complex realities that underlie a nationwide partisan debate. Saddled with a history of racial and socioeconomic inequalities, Memphis – a bustling commercial and distribution center on the Mississippi River – also has long-running problems with police corruption. That came into sharp focus after the killing of Tyre Nichols by police officers in 2023.
The city’s Democratic Mayor Paul Young says that he didn’t ask for the National Guard, but that he will “work strategically” to align federal resources with local policing priorities.
But there’s also a sense that Memphis – three hours west of more conservative Nashville, which is also high on the crime charts – has served as a target for Republican state and county lawmakers who have restricted the city’s taxation authority and forced it to hew to the state’s loose gun safety laws, says Aram Goudsouzian, a political historian at the University of Memphis.
“In terms of understanding [why Governor Lee has invited federal deployment], it’s important to understand where Memphis fits into Tennessee state politics,” says Professor Goudsouzian. “It is the single Democratic stronghold in a state that is Republican-dominated. It’s an easy target for white rural legislators … to demonize Memphis and to paint it as a crisis to score political points without actually diving into the issues that would help” reduce crime.
State law allows open and concealed carry of handguns without a permit, as well as guns in cars.
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
The River City is known for its blues on Beale Street and grandeur of Graceland, but also, sadly, for incidents like a shooting this month in which a spray of bullets injured four children who were at a home.
Mr. Trump’s call to send National Guard troops to Memphis follows earlier Guard deployments he ordered this year in Los Angeles and the nation’s capital. Such moves are limited by laws that curb the use of troops in domestic law enforcement, and Mr. Trump’s controversial effort to deploy the National Guard for urban public safety comes as overall violent crime, including homicides, has been falling.
But public concern about urban violence – and his promise to support police and tougher laws – was a winning campaign issue for him.
Public support for more law enforcement
In fact, some polls show that over half of Americans support President Trump’s handling of crime, a topic – along with that of deporting unauthorized immigrants – that the Republican president has made a centerpiece of his administration.
“You should never get to a point where your citizens throw their hands up and say, ‘I don’t care what you have to do, just come in here and clean this up,’” says Louis Quijas, who oversaw the FBI’s Office of Law Enforcement Coordination under President George W. Bush.
In general, while Democrat-led cities tend to have the highest violent crime statistics, when measured by state, crime rates are highest in Republican-led locations. And the violence accelerator in any given community may be less about policing than about other social conditions, suggests a recent Manhattan Institute analysis. In Memphis, for example, the poverty rate is 22.6%, nearly double the U.S. national rate, which puts it second in overall poverty among large cities with populations of over 500,000.
And, while Republicans often blame Democrats for not being tough enough on crime, experts say that social policies from both parties – including conservative ones like lax gun laws and cuts to public education and social safety net programs – can play a role in creating conditions for illegal activity.
“Ironically, many initiatives [aimed at collaboration between federal and local law enforcement] have been eliminated, and now we’ve turned toward militarization,” says Brenda Bond-Fortier, an expert on policing structures at Suffolk University in Boston.
Federal intervention, including the use of the National Guard to quell unrest, is nothing new. The federal government infiltrated cities in the 1960s and 1970s to dismantle mafia organizations. After 9/11, federal task forces surged into cities to root out potential attacks.
After sending troops to Washington earlier this year, where Mr. Trump had more leeway to do so, given its status as a federal enclave, carjackings fell by 87%, according to the D.C. Police Union.
While the National Guard might provide a quick fix, the Trump administration’s strategy is “misapplying the purpose of military force,” says Buddy Chapman, a former Memphis police director and author of “Call Me Director: Memoir of a Police Reformer.”
Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor/File
“Military force is not to keep you from doing something,’’ he adds. “It’s to eliminate and eradicate you. Crime is a different matter.”
The Trump administration now also plans to send 1,000 National Guard troops to Louisiana, though Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, has not asked for that help. New Orleans is “in really bad shape,” Mr. Trump said in a Fox News interview last week. “I can fix that up in a week and a half.”
New state-level Republican crime policies
Yet Republican state leaders, mainly in the South, have already begun reforms that align with President Trump’s promises of policing with fewer legal barriers.
In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp has ordered a pivot by the state Highway Patrol toward urban neighborhoods. In Louisiana, Governor Landry has established Troop NOLA to use state troopers for foot patrols in urban communities. And in Jackson, Mississippi, a new law has created a state-run court to address crime in the downtown district. Jackson Mayor John Horhn, a Democrat, voted against the law as a senator, but after he took over as mayor, he called it a “necessary evil.”
This past March, Missouri state lawmakers restructured the police oversight board in St. Louis after spikes in crime. And in Indiana, lawmakers recently instituted a new oversight board that can investigate prosecutors who face complaints for being too lenient on alleged lawbreakers.
Some of those efforts have yielded positive reviews.
But they haven’t relieved deep-seated concerns over the consolidation of policing power. And now, the Guard deployment in Memphis amounts to the expansion of “the power of the presidency through the barrel of a gun,” says Rhodes College historian Charles McKinney, co-editor with Professor Goudsouzian of “An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.”
In 2023, Memphis saw a city record of 390 homicides. But starting last year, the numbers began dropping, and in the first half of 2025, the River City’s overall crime rate was at a 25-year low due to local efforts, such as enhanced police strategies, more effective data analysis, a rise in local efforts to create positive programs to address youth involvement in crime, and new collaborations with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute cases with federal prison time as a consequence.
The city has a long reputation for community generosity and healing. A 2017 study by The Chronicle of Philanthropy found that Memphians gave a higher proportion of their income to charity than any other major metropolitan area, with an average of 5.6% of income going to charitable causes. The city’s Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association, founded in 1968 to help heal the city after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., continues to support many of the city’s poor.
Still, high-profile violence continues to spur criticism of liberal criminal justice policies, such as those around use of force and bail, now used in many cities to address civil rights issues.
Mr. Quijas, who is also the former police chief in High Point, North Carolina, says current conditions justify a federal response, like the one President Trump is undertaking, in some cities.
“We have excellent police chiefs and police commissioners who are being handcuffed by bad policies,” he says.
Others insist that the roots of American violence are more endemic and require a community effort along with better law enforcement.
“We will never be able to address our nation’s crime problems – white collar as well as street crime – if we turn these issues into political footballs,” writes Randolph Roth, author of “American Homicide’’ and a historian at The Ohio State University, in an email.
“Grandstanding … won’t get the job done. Listening to one another, respecting one another, and governing to the center can.“
Staff writer Victoria Hoffman contributed to this report.
