Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said Monday that President Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in the nation’s capital could backfire, citing the soldiers’ lack of experience with community policing.
“Even the most tactically astute, highly trained FBI agents, those who serve on SWAT teams. I know this as a former SWAT team member. They don’t know. They don’t do community policing,” McCabe said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “They don’t walk beats the way that police officers do every day, day in and day out.”
“And if FBI agents don’t have that skill set, I can tell you for sure, [the National Guard’s] people don’t have that either,” he added.
Trump activated the National Guard on Monday in an effort to combat “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse” less than a week after a former government employee was attacked.
However, local leaders have pushed back on the measure, citing statistics that show the crime rate in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.
“It is totally unclear how this infusion of manpower is actually going to have a meaningful impact on the crime rate, which we know is not as it was described by the president today in his justification for calling this emergency,” McCabe said.
“So the entire predication, as it were, the factual basis for this act, for this declaration, we know, is false, because the things he said in the press conference were not true,” he added.
The effort marks the second time Trump has deployed the National Guard since he began his second term in office. Weeks prior to the latest move, groups of Marines and National Guards members set foot in Los Angeles to quell protests against the president’s immigration agenda.
“While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) said during a Monday press conference.
She also noted that the president’s moves may have been sparked by fears developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is true that those were more challenging times related to some issues,” the mayor said. “It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-COVID, but we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets and gave our police officers more tools, which is why we have seen a huge decrease in crime.”
She continued, “Crime isn’t just down from 2023, it’s also down from 2019 before the pandemic, and we’re at a 30-year violent crime low.”
Bowser added that police are keeping their “foot on the gas” to ensure crime continues to decrease.
But her counterpart, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), said military presence won’t help bring about peace.
“You don’t use the military to help people feel better,” she said Monday during an appearance on CNN’s “The Arena.”
Trump deployed the troops under a provision in Washington’s Home Rule Act, which gives the president the authority to act in the district if he “determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist.”
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