Crackdown on cities risks making them less safe

By Erika D. Smith / Bloomberg Opinion

As President Donald Trump continues to talk about sending federal agents — and possibly National Guard troops — to the streets of Chicago and other American cities, many Democratic politicians have been falling back on one particular line to describe what’s happening: It’s a “dangerous power grab.”

But what Trump is doing to cities isn’t merely some high-minded, authoritarian affront to democracy, federalism or the Constitution. It’s also just plain dangerous.

By sending armed and, in some cases, insufficiently trained troops and employees from an alphabet soup of federal agencies on a vague mission to do the duties of beat cops, Trump is injecting an unpredictable new element into local law enforcement. And it’s a risk to public safety.

“There is not a world where we keep doing this, and there isn’t someone who dies as a result of the stupidly useless and manufactured confusion and disorganization caused as a direct result of injecting federal law enforcement into places where they do not have the training nor the interest in manufacturing trust with communities,” said Phillip Atiba Solomon, a co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale University.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-crackdown-on-cities-risks-making-them-less-safe/