‘Racial Justice’ Org Weighs in on National Guard Deployment

The Legal Defense Fund said Thursday it had sent letters asking governors of six states not to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.

Its letters follow announcements from those states that they plan to deploy troops to the nation’s capital to counter what Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called the “out of control” crime there.

The Legal Defense Fund asked those states to reconsider, saying there is “no crime emergency in Washington, D.C.”

In 2024, D.C. suffered 27.3 homicides per 100,000 residents—the fourth-highest homicide rate of any city in the country. The same year, police reported 667 “assault with deadly weapon” crimes in the city. 

Neither of those statistics account for recent charges that D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department falsely reported serious crimes like assault as lesser offenses in order to report lower crime rates.

On Aug. 11, President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the city, taking control of the MPD and deploying 800 of D.C.’s National Guard troops. Shortly thereafter, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina each announced that they would also be deploying National Guard troops to D.C.

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In its letters, the Legal Defense Fund asserted that instead of promoting safety, National Guard deployment “makes residents feel more unsafe” and poses an “anti-democratic threat to people’s civil rights and liberties.”

Founded by the NAACP in 1940—though now a separate organization—the Legal Defense Fund says its mission is to use “the power of law, narrative, research, and people” to defend “the humanity and advance the rights of Black people in America.”

In 2023, Washington, D.C., had the highest homicide rate among black people in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins’ Center for Gun Violence Solutions. About 95% of homicide victims in the city were black, research from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform suggests.