(New York) Will Donald Trump send federal police to New York and other Democratic strongholds facing a spike in crime? The standoff is underway, especially with his hometown, as the Republican president has made the return of “order” one of his slogans as the presidential election approaches.
Posted on 21 July 2020 at 11 h 25 Updated at 11 h 43
Catherine TRIOMPHE
France Media Agency
On Tuesday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke out against the threat the US president had raised the day before to send federal forces to the US economic capital.
If Trump sent federal agents, “that would only add to the problems” and “we would immediately take him to court to stop this,” the mayor said at a press briefing.
“This would be another example of the illegal and unconstitutional measures taken by the president”, he added.
The day before, the Democratic mayors of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Kansas City and the federal capital Washington had sent a letter to the American Minister of Justice, William Barr, and to the director of the Department of National Security, Chad Wolf, to oppose the “unilateral deployment” of federal forces at home. In the United States, the municipalities are in principle the masters of the methods used in dealing with crime.
Returning to the dispatch in recent days of federal police to Portland, Oregon – where agents, in camouflage uniform and without identification badges, made disputed arrests – they considered that their interventions had contributed to an “escalation” of tensions, and compared the method to “tactics used by authoritarian regimes”.
“Leftists”
For his part, the president, much criticized for his management of the pandemic and preceded in the latest polls by his democratic rival Joe Biden, has made the return of “law and order” one of his main slogans campaign, three and a half months before the November presidential election.
The Trump administration rejects any accusation of abuse of power: it justified sending agents to Portland by the need to protect the city's federal buildings, including its federal court, which was targeted by the demonstrators.
But with the approach of the ballot, the subject is promising for the Republican camp, while the big cities recorded a surge of violence in the wake of the demonstrations against the police brutalities which followed the death of George Floyd at the end of may.
“We are not going to let down New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore,” Trump said on Monday, accusing their elected Democrats of lax “radical leftists”.
It is in Chicago, a city with endemic crime where Trump has deemed the situation “worse than in Afghanistan”, that federal agents could be deployed as early as this week, according to several American media.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany on Tuesday refused to confirm this information: the president “made no announcement on who would go where,” she said. She added, however, that the city's Democratic mayor, Lori Lightfoot, was “clearly incapable of controlling the streets”.
After a constant fall since the middle of the years 1990, New York, the city where Trump made his fortune and where the Trump Organization remains anchored, has saw crime pick up again this year – especially since June – with shootings and murders up respectively 60% and 23% since January, especially in parts of East Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn.
The metropolis has the largest municipal police in the country with 25 00 0 police officers. Many of them have criticized reforms adopted after the “Black Lives Matter” protests to reduce police violence, and their morale is low, some officials say.
According to Mr. De Blasio, if federal agents were deployed despite his objections, their impact would be “minimal”. “It will only add pain and confusion, maybe that's what he (Trump) wants,” he said on Tuesday.
