The U.S. Capitol is seen as members of the National Guard patrol the National Mall in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. A new NPR-Ipsos poll finds Americans are concerned about crime, but don’t broadly support President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to police U.S. cities.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
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Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Americans are concerned about crime, but don’t broadly support President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to police U.S. cities according to a new NPR-Ipsos law enforcement poll. The survey also shows a significant partisan divide over Trump’s crime-fighting tactics.
The ongoing presence of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. has drawn protests, and a federal judge has ruled the deployment of troops to Los Angeles is illegal. Still, Trump is pushing ahead to expand the practice as a way to crack down on crime. He says Memphis, Tenn. is next.
“It’s very important because of the crime that’s going on not only in Memphis, in many cities, and we’re going to take care of all of them, step by step, just like we did in D.C.,” he said at a White House ceremony.
He’s threatened to send troops to other Democratic-led cities including Chicago, New Orleans, and Baltimore.
The new NPR-Ipsos poll indicates that people are worried about crime.
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“It’s a pretty widely held belief,” says the global polling firm’s vice president Mallory Newall. “Around seven in ten Americans say that the level of crime and violence in American cities is at an unacceptable level.”
Crime overall, including violent crime, is down significantly from pandemic-era highs across the U.S. But that doesn’t bear out in public perception.
“The American public largely agrees that crime has increased in the U.S. and in major cities,” Newall says. “They don’t broadly support the actions taken in the name of stopping crime, like calling in the National Guard.”
For instance, about half of those polled oppose deploying National Guard troops to their town or a major city in the state they live in.
Not surprisingly, there’s a major split along party lines.
“About eight in ten Republicans support something like that and almost the same number of Democrats oppose,” Newall says. “So there is a significant partisan divide here.”
That divide also shows up in public opinion about the continued deployment of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital.
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“They’re there for show. Totally unnecessary,” says Democrat Les Blackmore. He’s among the 1,020 people Ipsos interviewed between September 19th and 21st. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
Blackmore, 70, is a retiree who lives in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. He says the Guard deployments feel like an occupation.
“Are we really going there?” he asks.