In a podcast interview Wednesday, Mayor Brandon Scott said President Donald Trump’s threats to send in federal troops to the city are the result of his “obsession” with Baltimore, insisting that the city is lowering crime on its own: “We don’t need or want the National Guard.”

As Trump prepares to send the troops to Memphis, in the wake of having Washington, D.C., under federal control, Scott said he rejects the notion that Baltimore’s crime is rampant enough to require intervention from the president.

Scott again touted Baltimore’s lowered crime statistics and violence prevention strategies, while spurning media stereotypes that Baltimore has faced over the years.

“The truth is that we’ve always had to battle those kind of narratives, whether it be ‘The Wire’ or ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ or ‘The Corner’ or whatever TV show that was filmed here,” Scott said during an interview with Al Leston on the Reveal podcast.

“No one looks at New York, and the first thing that they think about in New York is ‘NYPD Blue’ or ‘New York Undercover’ or one of the 20,000 different variations of ‘Law & Order.’ But for Baltimore, that has always been what people have known because that’s what’s been fed to them about the city.”

Scott also called attention to the cities being targeted for military intervention, pointing out that they have Black Democrats as mayors, specifically Washington, D.C., Oakland, California, and Chicago, and lower levels of violent crime than in previous years.

Scott cited Baltimore’s murder rate, which regularly saw over 300 homicides yearly during Trump’s first term. Baltimore City had 348 murders in 2019 compared to 262 murders in 2023 and 201 in 2024.

He said Trump’s desire to send troops to Baltimore is an “obsession” with the city.

“They think that the American people are stupid and that he’ll come in and tag along to these already historic violence reductions and say, “Look what I did,” and that people will fall for it,” Scott said. “They are testing the limits of what the American people will allow them to do, when they give them an enemy, when they give them an issue, when they give them people to hate.”

Baltimore City has seen a significant decrease in crime over the last several years. Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said the department’s clearance rate for homicides has doubled since 2023, from 30% to 60% in 2025. Violent crime in August 2025 was down 19% overall compared to August 2024, according to city officials.

Scott said he has offered solutions for Trump to help reduce crime in other ways, like restoring grants for violence reduction programs, calling on mayors nationwide to ban guns with Glock switches and repealing the Tiahrt Amendment, which prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing gun trace info to anyone other than local law enforcement or prosecutors.

“The irony of this is that prior to the president going off in August, on August 11th, actually my anniversary day … we actually had been going viral in Baltimore for the homicide reduction,” he said. “His remarks have actually caused a lot of more people to even start sharing that information and it’s really about communicating that out in many ways.”

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