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Kid Rock recently insisted that President Donald Trump has been trying to “help” Black communities in Chicago by pushing to deploy National Guard troops in the city. But experts in history and Black social movements have since had a lot to say about why the musician’s arguments gravely missed the mark.
During a segment of Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” last week, host Laura Ingraham slammed Democratic leaders in Chicago and Illinois for consistently objecting to the Trump administration’s efforts to deploy National Guard troops to the city amid its purported mission to fight crime — even as overall violent crime rates in the country’s third-largest city have fallen.
“Democrats, let’s face it, they do not care about crime,” Ingraham said at one point in the segment before she asked Kid Rock, a prominent Trump supporter, to share his thoughts on Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and “others on the left who are just dismissing this issue that real people have to live with, day in and day out.”
“Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is, idiots, straight-up idiots,” he responded, before he later continued: “You know what really strikes [me] about this — speaking about Chicago — who is he really trying to help out here? Black people. The south side of Chicago, predominately Black. These are where these murders and shootings are taking place, the majority of them — they’re not out in the suburbs or somewhere.”
“He wants to help these people,” he added. “And God forbid, we’re still all ‘Nazi racists,’ or whatever their narrative of the day is. It’s asinine.”
Trump, who has a long history of spewing disparaging remarks about Chicago, has either talked about or has actually sent federal troops to Democratic-led cities since the summer. And he’s been threatening to send National Guard troops to Chicago for months.
Last week, Texas National Guard troops arrived in Illinois after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on social media that he had authorized Trump to send hundreds of federal troops from Texas to Illinois.
Days later, a federal judge ruled to temporarily block the National Guard deployment in Chicago for at least two weeks. On Saturday, the appeals court granted a pause in the case until it can hear further arguments, the Associated Press reported.
The city had already been dealing with an increase in the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, resulting in aggressive and violent raids amid the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.
Last month, federal agents raided an apartment building in Chicago’s predominantly Black South Shore neighborhood in the middle of the night as part of an operation. Seniors and children were among the people forced out of the building. Rodrick Johnson, a U.S. citizen and resident of the building, told the AP last week that agents broke through his door and zip-tied him.
“The appalling overnight military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood is part of an ongoing effort to sow fear in our communities and force local leaders to bend to federal will and power,” said Martha Biondi, professor of Black studies and history at Northwestern University.
Scott Olson via Getty Images
History has taught us that mass incarceration and saturated policing have not made us safer, experts say.
Biondi emphasized that Kid Rock’s assertion that Trump is trying to “help” Black communities falls flat — especially considering his administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, practices.
“Far from wanting to help Black people through deployment of the National Guard, Trump is lying about crime rates in Chicago and mobilizing fears of crime to justify his unconstitutional effort to militarily attack the people and neighborhoods of Chicago,” she told HuffPost.
“If Trump cared about Black people, he wouldn’t have demonized and canceled so many diversity and equity initiatives that, alongside the firing of federal workers, has led to a sharp recent uptick in Black unemployment,” she continued.
And Biondi believes history has shown that sending more federal agents to Chicago won’t make communities safer.
“History has taught us that the shift toward mass incarceration, saturated policing and overall securitization of our society has not made us safer,” she said. “It has functioned to make ‘fear of crime’ a major governing strategy at the expense of investments in human needs.”
Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., an urban historian and professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo, said that there’s no “out-of-control crime wave in Chicago” and that crime in the city has been dropping.
Taylor questioned why Kid Rock was invited to speak on issues of crime and the Black community in Chicago in the first place.
“What is troubling is why Fox News is turning to a white entertainer, whose fan base consists mainly of white, rural and working-class audiences, rather than an established authority on the subject,” he told HuffPost, before adding that he believes the musician has “limited contact with the Black community.”
And Taylor emphasized that increasing policing does not make communities safer.
“It just expands incarceration and increases the likelihood of police killings,” he said. “Chicago already spends nearly $2 billion a year on policing, with hundreds of millions in overtime alone, yet the underlying causes of violence remain untouched.”
Taylor said that “history has shown that increasing the police and ‘get tough on crime’ polices don’t work.”
He referenced the heroin epidemic in the 1960s and ’70s that led to then- Gov. Nelson Rockefeller enacting “draconian drug laws intended to deter crime through harsh sentencing.”
“The outcome was tragic,” he said, before adding, “The result was mass incarceration, not safety.”
And Taylor said the ICE raid in the Black South Shore neighborhood is “precisely the type of thing that Blacks are fearful about.”
“The police are not and have never been the friends of Black people,” he said. “Every Black parent, myself included, teaches their children how to react when stopped by the police, because of the danger of police and Black citizen encounters.”
“The use of the military and the National Guard in Black neighborhoods is not going to make them safer,” he added.
A 2024 Prison Policy Initiative report, citing 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics, found that while fewer people interacted with police in the U.S. than in prior years, racial disparities in policing persisted. Black people were still more likely than white people to experience police-initiated contact, and they were over three times as likely as white people to experience the threat or use of force, the organization stated.
There are other ways to help make communities safer, experts emphasize.
“Every serious scholar, community organizer and resident knows that the only way to reduce crime truly is to attack the root causes: neighborhood underdevelopment, poor education, poverty, ill health, lack of jobs and limited access to essential services,” Taylor said. “Militarization doesn’t solve those problems — it worsens them.”
Taylor said it’s important to empower neighborhood residents and community activists to “transform marginalized, underdeveloped, and racialized neighborhoods into healthy, thriving and joyful communities.”
“Imagine if we flipped the budgets — gave the billions we spend on policing to the people working to reimagine and rebuild Black and brown communities, and gave the police what community groups get now,” he said. “I guarantee you, the neighborhoods would be safer, healthier and full of opportunity within a generation.”
Taylor said that he believes Trump’s “real” goal with his efforts to send National Guard troops to U.S. cities is a part of a “broader authoritarian project,” which is to “normalize the presence of the military patrolling the streets of major cities.”
“And then, later, declare martial law in these cities — a significant step toward the establishment of police rule and an authoritarian state,” he said.
Biondi said that when it comes to solutions to addressing crime, “sociologists, urban policy makers and legal advocates have concluded that policing does not address the root causes of violence.”
“Rather, investments in mental health care, summer youth job opportunities and wrap-around services in public schools, are much surer paths to crime and harm reduction,” she said.
Biondi said that Trump’s “demonization of and attacks on many American cities, notably ones led by Democratic mayors, is unprecedented and frightening.”
“His venom, in turn, encourages others to unleash aggression and hate,” she said. “Thankfully in Illinois, our elected officials have been outspoken in their critiques of the violent bully in the White House, but unfortunately so many other leading Democratic officials, like their counterparts in law and academia, have focused instead on trying to appease Trump, or simply stay quiet in the hopes that this storm will pass.
“But the current regime in Washington only continues in violating international and domestic laws, shattering norms, breaking rules, and refusing constraints,” she continued, before adding:
“We all need to find ways to stand up to authoritarianism and protect our neighbors and ourselves.”
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