Some of the nation’s most prominent Black mayors are celebrating major drops in crime in their cities — and grumbling that President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to realize the accomplishment.
Trump has repeatedly insisted that cities, particularly those run by Democrats, are overrun with violence, despite the fact that 2025 is on track to have the fewest homicides ever recorded by the FBI. He deployed troops to Los Angeles and Washington and threatened to send them elsewhere.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said that ignores the realities in cities like his, which recorded just five homicides in April, its lowest on record.
“When we accomplish those things, then the goal post gets moved,” Scott said Friday at a forum of mayors at the annual conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. “People are like, ‘well, what about stolen cars?’”
Scott’s views were echoed by other mayors at the event, including Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Oakland’s Barbara Lee and Washington’s Muriel Bowser — all targets of the president’s rhetoric about safety in American cities.
Johnson, whose city is experiencing a 30 percent drop in crime and the fewest homicides it has seen in a decade, says the focus is no accident.
“I just want to lift up the fact that the very places that are under attack are all spaces that are led by Black leaders,” he said to a mostly Black audience. “We just got to name it. I know we know that, but I want to say it out loud that it’s very intentional, because there is an extremism in this country that has not accepted the results of the Civil War and they’re fully engaged in the rematch.”
Bowser said Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington under a “fake emergency” that was cover for immigration enforcement. The federal action, she said, has “been very menacing and has disrupted … the trust that our communities have with our own police.”
The federal law enforcement presence in Washington was originally set to last for 30 days ending earlier this month, but has since been extended.
Van Johnson, the mayor of Savannah, Georgia, said many Black mayors applaud and have taken notes from Bowser’s handling of the National Guard deployments and how to resist, but not forcefully agitate Trump in the process — all while juggling the expectations of their citizens.
“We live at the intersection of white fear and Black expectation,” said Johnson, head of the African American Mayors Association. “It’s a very, very unique intersection for us … [because the] white fear is that we’re doing too much, and Black expectation that we’re not doing enough. It is a very hard and very lonely place.”
