A majority of Chicago residents don’t believe deploying the National Guard is a solution to crime in the city, according to findings from a recent survey.
According to a ChicagoSpeaks poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, 56% of Chicagoans believe that using the U.S. military and National Guard to assist local police is unacceptable, while 66% of Chicagoans surveyed oppose the military and National Guard being used to help in deportations.
The poll’s findings come at a time when U.S. District Judge April Perry on Oct. 9 barred the federalization and deployment of the National Guard in Illinois for at least 14 days. President Donald Trump had previously authorized the deployment of 300 Illinois National Guard troops on Oct. 4, who were later joined by 200 troops from Texas and 14 from California.
The National Guard was deployed in Chicago amid the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in the city, which was launched in early September. The National Guard was deployed because of “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness,” according to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, “that local leaders like Pritzker have refused to step in to quell.”
But Perry said the Trump administration’s “perception of events” around the city “are simply unreliable,” stating she had seen “no credible evidence that there is danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois.”
The poll also found that a majority of Chicagoans view crime as a problem in their city, but that most don’t feel federal intervention is the solution. Of the people polled, 71% feel that crime is a major problem in the city at large, and 42% felt it was a major problem in their own neighborhood.
Despite this sentiment, 69% of Chicagoans believed it is unacceptable for the U.S. military or National Guard to take control of local police departments.
But while most Chicagoans are opposed to the federal government’s use of the military or National Guard in policing, polling found a stark partisan divide among Chicagoans.
The poll, which was conducted from Sept. 16-29 — before the National Guard’s deployment — found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support federal intervention.
Of Republicans polled, 79% support the National Guard and U.S. military assisting in deportation efforts in the city, while 84% of Democrats oppose federal intervention in the deportation campaign.
Similarly, 70% of Democrats oppose the military and National Guard assisting local police, while 78% of Republicans find it acceptable.
The ChicagoSpeaks poll of 1,361 adults was conducted using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based ChicagoSpeaks Panel, which is designed to be representative of the Chicago population. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.