The governors of several states are sending hundreds of additional National Guard troops to the nation’s capital.
Trump administration officials reportedly say some National Guard members in Washington, D.C. may now carry firearms, reversing previous assurances that all troops would be unarmed.
That worries one former Detroit police chief and deputy mayor.
Isaiah McKinnon was a young police officer working with National Guard troops when violence broke out in Detroit during July of 1967.
McKinnon says he’s had concerns for decades whenever the U.S. military mixes with the nation’s civilian population.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length
Isaiah McKinnon: I’m always skeptical because my experiences going back to the late 1960’s with the National Guard were not good. I hope that people understand this is not a dig at the National Guard troops themselves. But I think that if we use people who are not trained in law enforcement, it’s like a police officer going to war in a foreign country. You’re not trained for that. You’re trained to deal with domestic type situations. And that bothers me. Because when I saw the National Guard here in Detroit and the things that they did, it was frightening and scary.
Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: That would have been during the 1967 Detroit riots or rebellion, depending on who you talk to, when you were not the chief but a police officer. Why was working with the Guard scary?
IM: They assigned a squad of National Guard people with me, a young officer. We were riding in Jeeps. I had been in Vietnam as an Air Force person and watched the military, and I was impressed with how they reacted to certain situations. But these National Guard people in Detroit, they were young people too. They asked me, “How are we going to do this? What are we going to do?” And I said, “Guys, listen, what we’ll do is we’ll look for looters. We’ll look for people that’s doing wrong things and bad things. And if we have to lock them up, that’s what we’ll do.” Well, as we’re driving in our Jeeps down the streets and patrolling one National Guard member said, “There’s someone moving up in the window on one of the streets.” It was, I think, Chicago Blvd. He started shooting at the window. I said, “Wait a minute! Did you see anyone? Did you see a gun or something?” “No, but it was suspicious.” You don’t shoot on suspicions. Those are the things that scared me because they had no idea of what they were there for. Doing things like shooting the street lights out because they don’t want people to see them. Now, we are years past that. But what are these guys [in Washington, D.C.] going to do when they come into a community? If there’s a domestic situation, are they thinking that they have to use ultimate force to take someone down?
QK: In a military situation, that’s what they would do, right? Try to get rid of the lights or that kind of thing.
IM: Yeah. But I saw National Guardsmen shoot at people and thank God they missed. In fact, my brother, who is now deceased, he told me a similar story. He was walking down 12th Street in Detroit and a number of National Guard people came in that area. They told the people to leave and the people started yelling and screaming back at them, which is a normal thing that people in these kinds of situations do. So, they started shooting at people. And I’m going, again, my God. These are the experiences that I’ve had and other law enforcement people have had. We don’t want to knock the National Guard. But when you bring someone into a domestic situation one has to be trained, for their safety and for the safety of the people that they might be interacting with.
QK: Now, to be fair, a Pentagon spokesperson claims that these particular National Guards people have been trained in de-escalation tactics and crowd control. And I know the Guard does help in certain natural disaster situations. But the Pentagon is also saying that the National Guard in Washington is going to, “Provide a safe environment for law enforcement officers so they can make arrests and be a visible deterrent for violent crime.”
IM: I would have to see it to believe it. I think people say things to make it sound better. But the reality is that you don’t know until they’re there and they have these interactions with people, someone screaming, yelling, throwing bricks and bottles at you. Do they start using ultimate force on them? Police officers have gone through countless hours of training about dealing with these kinds of situations. You can’t just go into a city and say, “My people are trained, they can handle that to relieve the officers.” So they relieve the officers and then what happens? What is making something safer for a police officer who’s responding to a situation or patrolling an area? It appears to be a convenient thing to say. But the reality is, we’ll see as things go on.
QK: You have experience as an officer and police chief and also as a deputy mayor. So you’ve been on both sides of governing and running a police department. President Trump says there is an emergency situation in Washington, D.C., so therefore he’s had to act. Others say they fear he could do the same thing in some other large cities. From your vantage point, do you fear that this could be the precursor, somehow, of the president, in effect, trying to take over police departments across the country?
IM: The proof is in what is happening right now. You had the mayor of Los Angeles who said, “We don’t need you.” The governor said the same thing. So did the mayor in Washington, D.C. If there’s a need to make the officers safer, let us hire more officers who are trained regularly to handle these kinds of situations. We’ve seen what has happened in other locations, whether it’s untrained officers or untrained troops that go in, it does not help the situation in that respective city. There’s a distrust of police officers. But there’s even more distrust of someone who comes in who the community doesn’t even know. I’ve seen this in all my years and it’s frightening to me, when you bring in troops. Someone said to me last night, “Dr. McKinnon, I never thought we would see troops patrolling the streets of our cities when there’s not a rebellion, there’s not a riot, there’s not these horrible things going on, but under the auspices of ‘We’re going to make things safer for the police.’” The way you make things safer for the police is, number one, hiring more law enforcement officers. Number two, you deal with the mental health situations of people and other things to calm or quell the actions that are going on in a respective location.
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