New York | Will Donald Trump send federal police officers to New York and other Democratic strongholds facing a spike in crime? The standoff is engaged, especially with his hometown, while the Republican President has made the return of “order” one of his slogans as the presidential election approaches.
• Read also: Faced with a deep crisis, New York called on to reinvent itself
• Read also: In New York, ravaged by the pandemic, the exodus has begun
• Read also: Coronavirus: in difficulty, Trump tries to regain control
On Tuesday, the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, rose up against the threat made the day before by the American president to send federal forces to the American 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.
“It 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 United States Minister of Justice, William Barr, and the director of the Department of National Security, Chad Wolf, to oppose the “unilateral deployment” of federal forces at home. In the United States, municipalities are in principle the masters of the methods used in dealing with crime.
Looking back at the recent dispatch of federal police to Portland, Oregon – where officers, in camouflage uniforms and without identification badges, made disputed arrests – they felt their interventions had helped “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 campaign slogans, to three and a half months of 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, targeted by the protesters.
But with the approach of the poll, the subject is promising for the Republican camp, as the big cities recorded a surge of violence in the wake of the demonstrations against the police brutality 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, calling their elected Democrats lax “radical leftists”.
It is in Chicago, a city with endemic crime where Trump 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 falling steadily since the mid-1990s, New York, the city where Trump made his fortune and where the Trump Organization remains anchored, has seen crime rebound this year – especially since June – with shootings and murders up by 60, respectively. % and 23% since January, especially in parts of East Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn.
The metropolis has the largest municipal police force in the country with 36,000 police officers. Many of them have criticized reforms adopted after the “Black Lives Matter” protests to reduce police violence, and their morale is at an all-time 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.
–
