White House pans Shapiro for questioning National Guard deployments

The White House dismissed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s opposition to President Trump potentially deploying National Guard troops to Philadelphia to fight crime, touting the results of the deployments elsewhere.

“Another wannabe presidential candidate is desperate to get into the news cycle by attacking the president’s highly successful operations to drive down violent crime,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to TribLive.

“This won’t fool the American people and Pennsylvanians who elected President Trump on his law-and-order platform,” Jackson added.

Trump hasn’t announced any plans to send National Guard troops into Pennsylvania’s largest city, but Shapiro said in response to a reporter’s question Tuesday in Philadelphia that officials “have been preparing for such a thing to happen here” since the president deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June after protests over immigration raids there.

He also described Trump’s decision to send troops to Los Angeles as “wrong-headed.”

Shapiro, a Democrat from Montgomery County, did not say what preparations state officials have been making.

The governor made it clear he opposes Trump deploying troops to Philadelphia as he has done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and has proposed doing in cities including Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans — arguing it would disrupt the progress being made.

On Thursday, Shapiro spokesman Manuel Bonder said the governor has been “very focused on public safety and investing in and supporting law enforcement since Day 1 as governor and long before that as attorney general.”

“There is a clear evidence that we’ve seen a decrease in crime,” Bonder said.

The governor’s office said last month gun violence in Pennsylvania has dropped by 42% since Shapiro took office in early 2023, while violent crimes were down 12% last year compared to 2022.

Elsewhere, reaction to sending troops into cities to combat crime has been mixed.

A poll published Thursday by The Economist and YouGov showed 49% of U.S. adults oppose the Trump administration doing so, 42% support it and 9% aren’t sure.

A federal judge ruled this week the administration broke the law by sending troops to Los Angeles in June. Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit Thursday arguing the deployment of troops there is an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement, The Associated Press reported.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has been critical of certain elements of the federal law enforcement surge and Trump’s characterizations of the city as a “nightmare of murder and crime” that has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

At the same time, she has shown a willingness to work with the Trump administration and said the federal involvement has helped to reduce crime in the nation’s capital.

“We know that we have had fewer gun crimes, fewer homicides and we have experienced an extreme reduction in carjackings,” Bowser said during a news conference last week.

“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what (Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department) has been able to do in this city,” she added.

MPD statistics released this week show five homicides were committed in the city from Aug. 8-31, after the surge in federal law enforcement began, compared to 12 during the same period a year ago — a drop of 58%.

Sex abuse crimes dropped by 40%, robberies by 57%, burglaries by 49%, carjackings by 82% and motor vehicle thefts by 35% over the same period, statistics show.

The Metropolitan Police Department statistics show most of those crimes had already been occurring less frequently before the surge began — in some cases outpacing the reductions that occurred during the surge.

From Jan. 1 through Aug. 6, homicides were down 12% compared to the same period a year ago, sex abuse crimes dropped by 48%, robberies by 28%, burglaries by 19% and carjackings by 37%.

Assaults involving deadly weapons were an exception. The MPD statistics show they dropped 20% from Jan. 1 through Aug. 6 compared to the same period a year ago, but they increased 8% after the surge began.