Donald Trump has a habit of using Chicago when he wants to make a point about runaway urban violence, regardless of what is happening on the city’s streets.
But when the president labels Chicago a “hellholle” as he did Tuesday and threatens again to “send in the Feds!” to boost his image as a law-and-order chief executive, law enforcement experts and violence prevention leaders say sending the National Guard to Chicago would amount to a piece of political theater at best and “a recipe for disaster” at worst.
Crime here has swung high and low in the decade since Trump became a fixture on the national political scene. It spiked during the pandemic but is now dropping for the fourth consecutive year to levels not seen in more than a decade, mirroring a national decline and cutting against the president’s claims.
Through late August, Chicago had recorded 266 homicides in 2025, according to the Police Department. That’s a 32% decline in killings from the same time period in 2024. Total shooting incidents are also down 36% citywide. Reports of robberies, batteries, burglaries and car thefts — “index crimes” used by CPD and the FBI to gauge criminal trends — are all down by double-digit percentages too.
CPD officers are making more arrests this year, records show. The average daily population of detainees in the Cook County Jail has returned to pre-pandemic levels, even as the SAFE-T Act was passed and implemented, eliminating the cash bail system.
Whatever the homicide rate has been, Trump has repeatedly claimed he has a magic wand that will fix the issue. In his first term, he said he would recruit a “top gang thug” to help solve things and repeated a tale about a mystery Chicago police officer as solutions to the city’s present-day issues with violence, which are tangled up in economic, social, political and historic factors that stretch back for generations.
People who work in and around the city and state’s criminal justice system say that there are things the federal government can do to attack some of those factors and help the city continue to drive down violence. But sending in the National Guard is not one of them.
It’s not even certain whether Trump will go through with the plans to activate the Guard over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson — much less where soldiers would be stationed or what their mission would be, particularly since they are typically not trained in everyday civilian law enforcement.
And while Pritzker, Johnson and other officials have pointed to reduced violence as they made their demands for federal forces to stay out of the city, Paul Gowder, a professor who studies the constitutional law and the rule of law at Northwestern University, said whatever is going on on the streets of Chicago is “a red herring.”
Gov. JB Pritzker walks through downtown Chicago on Aug. 25, 2025, on his way to an event where city, state and federal leaders denounced President Donald Trump’s talk of sending the National Guard to the city. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)
“The federal government just doesn’t have the power to go running around making criminal law for day to day street crime in the states,” he said. “Fundamentally, the structure of federalism that we have allocates day to day crime control to the states. Not to the federal government. Full stop.”
‘Not how our constitution works’
The summer season, when violent crime typically peaks, is drawing to a close. The city remains on track to meet a goal Johnson set late last year: keep Chicago’s annual homicide tally below 500 in 2025.
City leaders have been quick to note the progress but loath to claim victory, and the decreases in violence have not been evenly distributed in the Police Department’s 22 patrol districts.
For example, the Gresham (6th) District on the South Side has seen a steep decline in killings year over year; 26 homicides were recorded in the first eight months of 2025 compared with 45 homicides in the first eight months of 2024.
In the Harrison (11th) District on the West Side — annually one of the city’s most violent, where shootings are often the result of feuds over drug sales turf — killings are up. Through the end of August, the district had seen 28 homicides, according to CPD, compared to 25 in the first eight months of 2024.
Federal authorities routinely arrest people for crimes that take place in Chicago, but typically do so in collaboration with local agencies. Just last month, federal, state and city officials announced that they’d charged 41 people in a two-month crackdown on illegal “switches,” which turn handguns into highly lethal automatic weapons.
Gowder, the constitutional law scholar, said that potentially activating troops to patrol Chicago was way outside of that kind of working relationship.
“They’ve just decided they don’t like how the state operates its criminal justice system, so they propose to replace it,” he said.
Gowder cited a litany of Supreme Court cases from a conservative-dominated court that established that such a move would be unconstitutional and said the Trump administration would likely try to justify deploying the guard by “making up connections to things that are within the federal government’s authority” such as interstate drug trafficking.
“This idea that it’s the job of the federal government to step in if states decline to control carjackings or whatever is just not how our constitution works,” Gowder said. “This is not squishy liberal stuff here.”
Gowder said the last time federal authorities activated troops over the objections of local officials was to uphold desegregation laws. But thanks to the 14th Amendment, that was an issue within the federal domain, he said.
“Right now, we’re talking about something the federal government doesn’t have authority over,” he said.
Gowder said Pritzker and Johnson would be “well within their power” to order agencies such as CPD or the Illinois State Police not to cooperate with federal officers if they did deploy, under similar legal logic that allows for cities or states to declare themselves sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement. Were either leader to instruct local law enforcement to work against or impede guard operations, he said, would create a “much scarier” question that evoked conflicts leading up to the Civil War.
Responding to a reporter’s question Tuesday about what he and other state officials could do to stop a deployment aside from speaking out beforehand or filing a lawsuit once troops are on the ground, Pritzker again acknowledged there were few other options.
“What are you suggesting? I mean, we follow the law here in Illinois, let me be clear. And when there is federal law that applies, we follow that. Where there’s state law that applies, we follow that,” Pritzker said Tuesday at an unrelated event in Decatur, before reiterating the recent decline in Chicago’s crime rate.
Trump could contribute to momentum
Trump previously estimated it would take “one week” for a National Guard deployment to curb crime in Chicago. But on Tuesday, he suggested it would take “two months” as he touted his relationship with Chicago police.
“We work very well with the police, because we naturally get along with the police,” he said. “So the police and us work really well together, whether the mayor is opposed.”
Police Department representatives have repeatedly referred requests to comment to City Hall, where Johnson has made clear his disdain for the idea of federal troops patrolling the city streets as they have been in Washington, D.C.
Armed National Guard soldiers from West Virginia patrol the Mall near the Labor Department in Washington, where a poster of President Donald Trump is displayed, Aug. 26, 2025. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
People who work in Chicago’s neighborhoods to prevent shootings and disrupt cycles of violence that are a major contributor to the city’s declining homicide tally said there are ways that federal assistance could make a real dent in the city’s homicide rate, but none like the splashy soundbites Trump has fallen back on in the past.
Institute for Nonviolence Chicago CEO Teny Gross pointed out that CPD doesn’t have its own forensics lab, instead sending bullet evidence downstate to Illinois State Police for test fires when it investigates cases.
He said if Trump wanted to push for the Police Department to get its own lab, that could help to solve crimes and bring more people to account for their actions. Or he could reverse the clawbacks of federal grants to anti-violence groups and instead back local investments in community violence interruption, which research shows is a promising way to break cycles of retaliation among people who are at the highest risk of being shot.
Or, he continued, the federal government could attack economic currents that are known to feed into violence, such as the housing shortage that can prevent people from finding the stability they need to turn their lives around.
“People come home from prison and they want a different life, they want to provide for their kids, and they can’t have a roof over their head,” Gross said.
Arne Duncan, managing partner of the anti-violence group Chicago CRED, said that federal authorities could bring about a reduction in shootings and homicides by stopping the flow of weapons into the city: “Station them on the border of Wisconsin and Indiana and have them check for guns,” he said. “Chicago’s not an island. It doesn’t have a moat around it.”
“If they were serious about trying to reduce violence, that’s the best thing they could do,” Duncan said. “At the end of the day, he’s just trying to create distractions from tariffs, from Medicaid cuts.”
Unwanted help
Wherever National Guard soldiers might go in Chicago, Sean Smoot guessed that they would get a frosty welcome.
“They would not be coming to an inviting environment,” he said. “Nobody’s asking for assistance here. Or at least nobody in the government is.”
Smoot, a policing consultant who also chairs the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, said that besides the fact that guardsmen wouldn’t have police officers’ familiarity with the neighborhoods and aren’t trained in civilian law enforcement, deploying troops where they were not requested could put guardsmen themselves at risk.
He nodded to recent clashes with federal forces in Los Angeles as a possible bellwether for what could unfold in Chicago.
“Not only was their presence not helpful in terms of reducing crime, which was why they were supposedly sent there, but it actually created more problems for the military and for the Guard members who showed up who were then attacked,” he said.
California National Guard and Marines hold back demonstrators at the Federal Building during a protest, June 14, 2025, in Los Angeles. (Noah Berger/AP)
Smoot chalked the whole proposal up to a stunt geared for TV cameras and predicted that soldiers, if they do come, would be stationed around placessuch as the Bean or the Magnificent Mile.
But were the Guard to deploy to the Chicago neighborhoods where violence, though dropping, remains too common, Smoot said their presence could do “a lot of damage in a very short period” to decades of work to make neighborhoods safer.
He compared the process of building relationships between law enforcement and neighborhood residents to planting a forest.
“One careless act in the flash of a second can burn it down,” he said. “And it will take another 100 years for it to grow back.”
Chicago Tribune’s Rick Pearson and Dan Petrella contributed.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/27/national-guard-chicago-crime/
