BALTIMORE (TIP): With President Donald Trump’s threat to send National Guard troops into Baltimore in the air, Maryland leaders said Friday, September 5,  that they will pour more of their own resources to further bring down crime in the state’s largest city. The open-ended increase in public safety efforts, announced by Gov. Wes Moore (D) and Mayor Brandon Scott (D), builds on an existing partnership that has already funneled cash to violence-interrupter groups and state prosecutors, an effort that the two men credit with helping drive Baltimore’s homicide count to its lowest in 50 years.

“We can do this ourselves,” Scott said Friday evening at a joint news conference with the governor outside St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. “We do not need an occupation. We do not need troops on our streets.”

He called the city’s population “a resource to be invested in, not a problem to be solved.”

Trump has characterized Baltimore as a “hellhole” and pointed to the city, along with Chicago and New Orleans, as a place he may want to replicate his intervention in D.C., where he declared a “crime emergency” Aug. 11 and sent nearly 2,200 National Guard troops alongside a surge of federal law enforcement agents.

Even as Trump this week softened his language about activating the Guard over the objections of local officials elsewhere, the president continued to stress the need for crime reduction in Baltimore.

“The people in Baltimore, the people in all the places we talk about, they want to see us there. And I think we’re pretty much waiting until we get asked,” Trump said. At the news conference Friday, Moore said the focus on enhancing public safety doesn’t have anything to do with Trump: “Nothing we’re doing is inspired by the president. The president does not inspire us.”

Scott led the crowd in a chant.

“We’re all we got!” the mayor yelled. The crowd hollered back, “We’re all we need!”

Maryland State Police troopers and officers from the Maryland Transportation Authority will do “proactive enforcement in high-risk areas” that will create “a highly visible law enforcement presence,” the governor’s office said in a news release. The extra officers will also assist in investigations of firearm and narcotics offenses.

Scott and Moore have refused to endorse using the Guard and conferred with state Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) on a legal game plan to stop it should Trump do it anyway. Meanwhile, they have publicly welcomed more agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as enhanced federal funding for local police, suggesting that the president support a federal ban of ghost guns and devices that give some guns rapid-fire capability.

“I have a whole list of federal resources that I would love for the president of the United States to be able to authorize,” Moore said this week during a public appearance at the National Press Club in D.C. But calling up the Maryland National Guard is not one of them.

“One hundred percent I would not accept it, and there’s no need for it,” Moore said, pointing out that the Guard has not been deployed in D.C. to help local policing.

“These are people with other jobs. These are people who still have their families relying on them, who now are being asked to come to Washington, D.C., to rake mulch and clean up trash and help people with their luggage when they arrive at Union Station,” he said. “And do you know why? Because they’re not trained to do municipal policing. Do you know who is trained? Local law enforcement. FBI and ATF agents.”

Under the targeted surge plan, Maryland State Police troopers will be sent to state-owned routes within Baltimore city limits, where they already have jurisdiction, allowing Baltimore Police Department officers to patrol elsewhere. The plan, which reactivates initiatives scaled back under then-Gov. Larry Hogan (R), also enhances a joint task force whose job is to track down people with warrants for their arrest.

“This is about getting the right resources to the right locations, and it’s just good policing,” said Adam Flasch, Moore’s deputy chief of staff and a retired brigadier general who is helping lead the governor’s response to a potential National Guard deployment.

“We’re not going to be done in a month and declare victory and walk away,” he said in an interview Friday, adding that the surge ensures constitutional policing that leads to prosecutable arrests, which in turn puts people into Maryland’s criminal justice system and its rehabilitation programs.

“That’s the difference in this approach. It’s not just smashmouth law enforcement of yesteryear,” Flasch said.

Scott referenced the stop-and-frisk policies that were pervasive in Baltimore during the 1990s, noting that those huge numbers of arrests still came alongside high homicide rates.

(The Washington Post)