Baltimore Has Record Crime Decrease [whether crime is high/low, Trump Has No Authority to Send Troops to Cities; There's No Insurrection, Feds Can't Enforce State Crim Law or Use Another States Guard]
/The seven homicides recorded in Baltimore last month were the fewest in the month of August on record, helping the city record its lowest homicide total through the first eight months of a year in over half a century, Mayor Brandon Scott said Monday.
But that didn’t prevent President Donald Trump from escalating his attacks on what he described Monday in a social media post as “the crime-drenched city of Baltimore.”
Baltimore recorded 91 homicides and 218 nonfatal shootings in the first eight months of 2025, Scott said in the news release. That represents a 29.5% decline in homicides and a 21% decline in nonfatal shootings compared with the same period last year.
The reductions so far this year follow year-over-year declines in homicides during the past two full calendar years.
“Baltimore has achieved historic progress, driving down shootings and homicides to historic lows,” Scott said in the release.
Public crime data shared by the city on Open Baltimore shows that crime is down in other categories, as well.
Violent crime overall dropped by 19% through Aug. 24 as compared to the same period last year. Property crimes also occurred less frequently in the city, through their decreases were smaller.
Auto thefts were down by 34% and robberies dwindled 27%. The smallest reductions were in burglaries, which inched down by 1%, and larceny (property theft) by 2%. The only category in which crime rose was arson, and the increase was a minimal 1%, to 77 offenses. [MORE]
Here, the media has purposefully missed the point that Trump’s threats to send military to act as a local police force are baseless and unlawful in D.C., (for different reasons) Chicago or Baltimore. The media has apparently done so to help elites continue to expand the power of the executive and/or to propagandize and establish in sheeple’s minds that, ‘emergency rule can be established at any time or place based on anecdotal and immeasurable, subjective criteria. After all, the media had no problem calling Trump a criminal or pointing any minor or major legal violation over the past 10 years. Now, playing dummy Trumps bignorant game, massa media simply discusses whether crime is an issue in a particular city- as if such a frivolous basis could somehow provide the legal basis for such extraordinary government action. In reality Trump has no authority to take over the police departments of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, etc.
In two landmark cases from the mid-1990s, U.S. v. Lopez and Printz v. U.S., the Supreme Court reaffirmed the sovereignty of the states and their primacy in matters of public safety. The Court made it clear that the feds cannot tell the states how to keep their streets safe or commandeer their assets or supplant them in matters of public safety. While the District of Columbia is actually owned by Congress, which gave the president his 32-day window to commandeer D.C. police to assist federal functions, since public safety is not a federal function, Trump’s efforts to clean up the streets and arrest the folks he says are thugs and brawlers are without a constitutional basis. [MORE]
Also, (unlike DC) the president doesn’t command any other state’s National Guard unless he calls them into federal service (i.e., “federalizes” them). There are various laws that authorize him to federalize the Guard, but none of them enable him to use it to fight the urban crime that he whines about. In general, due to the facts that there is no insurrection in any city, the executive has no authority to enforce state criminal laws and has no authority to use another’s state’s Guard, the president has no authority to play police in urban cities - unless they ask him to. As such, dummy Trump’s threats are paper boats that should be laughed at - but for this enabling media which has constructed a different reality in sheeple’s minds.
To be clear, in Los Angeles, Trump is relying on a law (Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code) that authorizes federalization when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States,” meaning federal law. Immigration law is federal law. Trump claimed that the protests rendered him “unable . . . to execute” ICE raids. Although dozens of raids happened during the protests and the administration did not cite a single raid that was thwarted, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deferred to Trump’s assessment.
But that law simply wouldn’t apply to the type of crime Trump has cited in Chicago — essentially, violent street crime. The laws that are implicated are largely those of Illinois and Chicago, not the “laws of the United States.”
Even under the Insurrection Act — which is the main exception to the law barring deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement — the president may deploy troops to execute the law only in situations involving either federal laws or those state laws designed to protect the constitutional rights of classes of people (basically, civil rights laws).
Nor can Trump ask other states’ governors to send their Guard forces into Chicago, as he did in DC under a law known as Section 502(f), which authorizes governors to voluntarily use their Guard forces for missions requested by the president or secretary of defense. Under this law, presidents have asked governors to deploy Guard forces within their own states, in other states that consent, or (as only Trump has done) in DC without local consent. No governor has sent Guard troops into another state that did not consent, as would be the case here. That’s because Guard forces deployed under this law remain state officers as a legal matter. And under the Constitution, states are sovereign entities vis-à-vis one another. That means one state cannot invade another, even at the president’s request. [MORE]
