How National Guard Deployments Split from Concerns About Community Crime

As the Trump administration has made deployment of the National Guard part of the nation’s discussion about controlling crime, multiple narratives have emerged.

Critics of the approach note that crime is actually down in most places, so it’s hard to discuss an emergency. Supporters argue that crime has long been out of control, especially in big cities, and the approach may help, at least temporarily.

Crime has been a subject of interest for the American Communities Project for years now, and we have asked about it in each of our first two surveys, especially in last’s years poll (see this piece from November 2024). And consistently the ACP finds attitudes about crime are complicated — some places cite it as a major problem, while others see fewer concerns.

But a few points jump out in the 2024 ACP survey data:

• Nationally, “gun violence and crime” ranked below a long list of other topics at the community level including: inflation, taxes, homelessness, health care, immigration, and opioid and drug addiction.
• In the individual community types, “gun violence and crime” was not cited as the top issue in any community. Across all community types, “inflation” was the top issue.
• The African American South counties stood out as the only ones where greater than 30% of the population cited “gun violence and crime” as a top issue.

The Numbers

To be clear, the argument that crime is going down has a lot of merit.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2024 found that violent crime declined by 4.5% compared to 2023 and property crime dropped by 8.1% in the same period. And a smaller study of cities in 2025 found that violent crime was down in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2024.

But the ACP found sharp differences in what people said about crime in their local community depending on where they live.

The 2024 survey offered a long list of topics and asked respondents to choose up to three that are the “most important issues facing your local community.” The chart below shows the percentage in each community type that put “gun violence and crime” into that group.

A few points become clear:

First, the African American South counties truly stood above the others on the question of crime. A 10-percentage point gap in these data was noteworthy, and that followed the 2023 survey, where these same communities stood above all the others.

Second, the African American South stood out for being the only one of the more rural community types where crime was seen as such an important issue. Most other rural places — the Evangelical Hubs, Graying America, LDS Enclaves, Rural Middle America, and Working Class Country — were in the single digits on the question.

Third, the places with higher concerns about crime were more urban or home to more densely populated places, most notably the Big Cities, College Towns, Middle Suburbs, Urban Suburbs, and Exurbs. However, the Military Posts, where guns are much more integrated into daily life, were also high at 18%. And the Hispanic Centers came in at 15%.

Deployments?

It’s important to keep those data points in mind as the Trump administration talks about, and deploys, National Guard troops. Crime is an especially complicated topic in the United States where realities can vary city to city and even block to block. And that’s especially true in the ACP’s Big City communities.

Washington, D.C., where the administration deployed National Guard troops more than a month ago, can be a very different city depending on where one sits. The outer reaches of Northwest Washington haven’t really seen guardsmen at all, and some D.C. residents have criticized the deployment on the National Mall especially during the daytime, where and when crime tends to be low.

That’s likely true in other Big Cities as well, where poverty and wealth as well as crime and safety are spread out very unevenly.

Indeed, the 2024 survey data suggest that if the goal is to help communities that have deep concerns about crime, the National Guard might be better deployed in the rural communities of the African American South. And President Trump announced last week that he was sending the Guard into Memphis, Tennessee, which is in Shelby County, an African American South community.

But even that approach is likely to face challenges.

Trump is not popular in Shelby County, where he got only 36% of the vote in 2024. It will be interesting to see how residents respond to the deployment and where the deployments happen.

But beyond that, there are 272 counties in the African American South, and the survey results in the ACP reflect deeply-rooted concerns about crime. That’s a lot of places scattered across a lot of states. It would be difficult to deploy the National Guard to all of them, and even if the administration could (and even if the communities wanted the troops there), they would leave at some point. One wonders how much any deployments would change the long-term concerns in those places.