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Philadelphia Mayor Rejects Calls to Bring in National Guard to Address Crime Wave

Homicides are up 24.5% and shootings are up 25.4% so far this year in Philadelphia as the city grapples with a spiraling crime wave, according to data from the Philadelphia Police Department.

Stanley Crawford, whose son was murdered in 2018, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the National Guard should be called in to Philadelphia to stem the surging crime.

“Bring them in and use them strategically. They have the data and the statistics to know where the violence is occurring. Put the National Guard there,” Crawford, who cofounded the Families of Unsolved Murder Victims Project and the Black Male Community Council, told the local newspaper this week. “It doesn’t have to be for a long period of time. Just until you stabilize the murders and shootings.”

Mayor Jim Kenney flatly rejected the idea of bringing the National Guard into Philadelphia on Wednesday, saying that he doesn’t think it would be an “effective tool to bring in uniformed, camouflaged, gun- rifle-carrying people in helmets to address this problem.”

“We used the National Guard in the civil unrest period to secure areas that needed to be secured from looting and burning, and it freed up the police to do other things,” Mayor Kenney said Wednesday during a press conference on the city’s gun violence response.

“But to send in the National Guard and a troop carrier into a neighborhood in Philadelphia, to me, is not respectful to that neighborhood, number one. Number two, they are not capable or trained to do urban policing, or do policing of any kind.”

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