Rogers calls on Detroit's mayor to ask Trump for help with crime

Melissa Nann Burke, The Detroit News on Sep 4, 2025

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Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Mike Rogers is calling on Detroit's mayor to ask President Donald Trump for federal help to "Make Detroit Safe Again,"though the city's violent crime rate has declined in recent years.

Rogers, a former FBI agent and former chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence panel, said in a Thursday statement that Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan "should be on the phone with the President now calling for backup."

Duggan, a longtime Democrat, is also seeking statewide office, running to be governor as an independent.

"The numbers don’t lie: Detroit has become a hub for violent crime," Rogers said in the statement.

“And these aren’t just statistics ― they’re people and families, whose lives have been flipped upside down because they aren’t even safe in their own community anymore. We have got to make our cities safe again."

Rogers, who has been endorsed by Trump, issued the call after the Republican president has publicly mused about sending the National Guard or other federal law enforcement to Democrat-led cities such as Baltimore and Chicago, though Trump this week suggested that he'd send troops to New Orleans next instead.

"We’re pretty much waiting until we get asked,” Trump said Wednesday about potentially activating National Guard units in other cities.

Duggan spokesman John Roach said Thursday that Rogers was "proving himself just another uninformed, grandstanding politician."

Roach pointed, as an example, to data showing that carjackings in Detroit are down from more than 750 in 2013 to 57 so far in 2025. In 2024, carjackings in the city plummeted to the lowest level since the Detroit Police Department began tracking the crime in the 1990s.

"Our strong partnership with U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon has just added several more federal prosecutors to drive the violence down even further," Roach said, referring to Detroit's top federal prosecutor and a Trump appointee.

"The historic drop in Detroit crime in recent years has come from the efforts of serious law enforcement professionals, not from non-serious politicians like Rogers.”

Detroit's violent crime rate has decreased 17% since 2021. Detroit's homicides dropped to 203 in 2024, the lowest number since 1965.

But the city does have a higher violent crime rate than most American cities with 1,781 violent crimes per 100,000 people compared with 926 in D.C., where Trump's administration took over the police department last month and deployed federal agents and National Guard troops on the city's streets. Detroit has perennially ranked in the top five cities with its homicide rate.

Detroit ranked second in 2024 for violent crime among cities with more than 500,000 residents, behind Memphis, Tennessee, which saw 2,501 violent crimes per 100,000 people, according to FBI data.

By comparison, Washington, D.C., ranked 10th in violent crime among places with more than 500,000 people in 2024, according to a Detroit News analysis of crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Behind Memphis and Detroit, the top five large cities with the highest violent crime rates were Baltimore (1,606 per 100,000 people), Kansas City (1,547) and Milwaukee (1,431).

Detroit has ranked in second place from 2021 to 2024 even while the city's violent crime rate fell 17%, dropping from 2,153 per 100,000 to 1,781 during that period, according to the FBI crime data.

Roach has touted the relationship between city law enforcement and federal agencies, saying it is "a major part of that success."

"This partnership is simple and effective: DPD does the policing and the feds have strongly increased support for federal prosecution," Roach said last month. "We appreciate the partnership we have today and are aware of no reason either side would want to change it.”

U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens of Birmingham, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, referenced the 1967 uprising in Detroit, when Michigan's then-Gov. George Romney called the National Guard in response to the civil unrest.

"Mike Rogers just called to deploy the National Guard to Detroit. Was wrong in ‘67 and it’s wrong now," Stevens tweeted. "This is exactly why I introduced a bill to stop Trump's abuse of power, because this chaos won’t stop in someone else’s community. It’ll come to ours unless we do something."

Trump in recent weeks has not mentioned Detroit among the cities where he's considering sending troops.

But on the campaign trail last fall, Trump disparaged Detroit and labeled crime levels across the nation as the "Kamala crime wave," referring to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who was then vice president.

"Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president," Trump said of Harris in remarks last fall to the Detroit Economic Club.

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(Staff writers Apurva Mahajan and Ben Warren contributed)

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