Slotkin: National Guard Not Trained to Deal with Riots, Has Made Them Worse Before

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) argued that members of the National Guard lack the training to respond to riots and argued that, at times, they’ve made things worse.

Slotkin said, “The National Guardsmen are dentists and doctors and construction workers and people who either served before or want to serve in a part-time capacity when they’re — in addition to having a full-time job. So, they very much are of the community. And I’ve got a lot of staff and former staff that are Guardsmen, and they have almost no training on how to do things in a law enforcement context. That’s the thing that we’re sort of missing here.”

Later, she added that “the National Guard was called in in 1967, in Detroit, during our riots. The riots were bad. No one disputes that. But the National Guard coming in made it worse, because they didn’t have the training. It went on for days, and people still talk about it and remember that. So, I don’t want that for the whole rest of the country.”

Slotkin further stated, “[T]he use of the uniformed military in the United States of America should be a last resort. If law enforcement completely cannot control a situation, and a governor says, please help me, then, fine, right? … And, to me, we should make our military an apolitical body. We should not use them as the arm of any one political goal or political party, because it’s bigger than that and we don’t want to set that precedent, right? The Republican governors would lose their ever-loving mind if a Democratic president sent in the National Guard and Marines to their state without their permission.”

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