Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee doesn't take kindly to her city being lumped in to Trump's fear-mongering campaign relating to urban crime, which he is using to justify deploying the National Guard in DC.

It was only a matter of time before President Trump tried to expand his authoritarian reach and made an attempt to militarize more places around the country — something he clearly took some delight in doing in Los Angeles when protests erupted there in June over ICE raids. And while Washington, DC makes sense as a first target because it is already a federally controlled district, and not part of a state with its governor, Trump seems all but certain to try to test the legal boundaries that would normally constrain a president, and to send National Guard troops elsewhere whenever he sees fit.

Trump name-checked Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles as places with "out of control" crime in a rambling speech on Monday. But he also called out two smaller cities that happen to have large Black populations, Baltimore and Oakland, as being "so far gone" and saying "we don't even talk about them anymore" because in his world, they were handed over to chaos and criminality decades ago.

Crime is actually on the decline in both cities, and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott went on CNN Monday and put out a statement saying, "This is the latest effort by the president to distract from the issues he should be focused on — including the roller coaster of the U.S. economy thanks to his policies. When it comes to public safety in Baltimore, he should turn off the right-wing propaganda and look at the facts."

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee also spoke out, saying, "President Trump's characterization of Oakland is wrong and not grounded in facts, but in fear-mongering. This is not leadership — it's an attempt to score cheap political points by tearing down communities he doesn't understand."

Lee added, "We're making real progress on public safety in Oakland, and while we acknowledge we have more work to do, we are doing this work each and every day. Our comprehensive public safety strategy is working — crime rates are coming down even though we still face many challenges. And let me repeat, President Trump is wrong."

Like San Francisco's, Oakand's homicide rate has been declining since the first year of the pandemic, hitting a five-year low in 2024 with 84 total homicides. In a city of 440,000, that comes to around 19 per 100,000 residents. (SF's rate is considerably lower, at around 4 per 100,000 residents as of last year.)

Homicides in Oakland are down a further 20% this year so far, with the city seing 37 homicides in the first six months of the year.

Baltimore's homicide rate is admittedly higher, nearly double Oakland's with 35 homicides per 100,00 residents last year, but that number of homicides — 201 — marked a 13-year low for the city, and the mayor notes that homicides are already down 28% so far in 2025.

KTVU spoke with David Levine, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, about the possibility of Trump declaring emergencies and sending federal troops into Bay Area cities or others, and he noted, "It’s harder to see a legal path in these other places," especially when there is a governor who could push back as Gavin Newsom has done with the situation in LA — which, still, has not been ruled constitutional by a federal court.

Meanwhile, Oakland civil rights attorney Adante Pointer tells KTVU that there is most certainly a racist angle to all of this.

"This is par for the course for Trump," Pointer says. "He continues to target and distort the facts as it relates to crime in American cities, particularly those in blue states run by Black mayors. His administration consistently tries to undermine these Black mayors and indulge [his] followers’ belief that Black leadership is incompetent and unworthy, and that their accomplishments are not based on merit or are somehow by DEI initiative. The facts are these mayors were democratically elected and have led their cities to significant drops in crime."

Trump's declaration Monday that he was deploying the National Guard to tamp down crime in DC stemmed directly from a highly publicized assault and attempted carjacking involving a former DOGE staffer, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, on August 3.

Previously: Majority of Americans Dislike Trump and Newsom, But They Hate Elon Musk More, According to Gallup Poll

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