After President Trump deployed the National Guard on Washington D.C., he vowed that this wasn’t the last city that will face occupation and then singled out Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, Calif. as “other cities also that are bad, very bad.”
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, globing mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore,” Trump said during a press conference Monday.
“It’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the president has a Black mayor,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN’s Laura Coates later that evening.
Scott refused to accept the President’s claim that these cities were “so far gone” explaining that these Black-led cities “…are seeing historic lows in violent crime.”
“Maybe we are too far gone,” Scott said in response to Trump, adding, “Too far gone from the broken right-wing policies of zero-tolerance policing and all the things that did not make our city safer for all those many years.”
Since Scott took over as mayor, Baltimore has experienced a 50-year low in homicides. Scott explained that creating a military approach in which the president looks to occupy cities led by Black mayors is not the way to drive violence down.
“We know that having the military there is not the way to do it,” Scott said.
“The way to drive down violence in cities has been proven. Mayors across the country have brought together law enforcement, the legal community, the actual community, community violence intervention work to reduce violence across this country and cities to lows that we have not seen in decades.”
The Baltimore mayor noted that Trump could “learn a lot from us.”
“We’re safer than we have been in decades, in my lifetime, in most cities,” explained the two-term 41-year-old mayor. “That’s something that each of these mayors should stand on [and] something the president should be coming to work alongside them to continue that partnership.”
Scott added that Trump is instead “dog whistling through right-wing propaganda and, quite frankly, racist viewpoints that [Republicans] have about these cities, and trying to convince the American people that what they know is not true.”
