These Chicago residents welcome extra help fighting crime but don’t want Trump to send the National Guard

By Omar Jimenez, CNN

Chicago (CNN) — Cedric Hawkins doesn’t take his age lightly. At 44, he’s had nine relatives killed by gun violence.

“Only one of my family members made it to be in his 40s,” Hawkins said.

After growing up around gangs in Chicago and having served time in prison, Hawkins now works with the anti-gun violence group Chicago CRED in part as a violence mediator, trying to stop gun violence before it has the chance to start.

The longtime southside Chicago resident has personally seen a decrease in murders in his Pullman neighborhood this year and like other residents, he worries a National Guard deployment to his city could throw off a playbook that, at least for now, seems like it’s working, he said.

“The presence of military for me, would put our communities in a situation where they feel like they are incarcerated,” Hawkins told CNN. “We’re already in a situation in Chicago where the trust with (local) law enforcement is very, very low.”

“(Trump’s) gonna do nothing but put our communities in Chicago in a situation where most likely, the trust is gonna go lower than it already is,” he added.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago amid the administration’s crackdown on crime. Those threats have faced pushback from residents and politicians, including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson who signed an executive order Saturday providing guidance and directives to city agencies, urging them to refrain from collaborating with the federal government.

“We have not called for this. Our people have not asked for this, but nevertheless, we find ourselves having to respond to this,” Johnson said before signing the order.

The Trump administration is also expected to launch a major immigration enforcement operation in Chicago as soon as this week, CNN has previously reported, which could also include the National Guard as a peacekeeping presence if needed.

Both Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have criticized Trump for suggesting he would deploy federal forces to the city, pointing to recent “historic reductions in crime.”

Last year, there were just under 600 homicides in Chicago, and so far this year there have been at least 274, according to city data.

Hawkins, whose personal mission keeps him close to gun violence, isn’t against federal help, but says it may not be the right approach.

“I beg President Trump to send the right resources, but as far as sending a National Guard, I believe that will put us in a situation where the whole city of Chicago will be right back where we started,” Hawkins said, recalling how the number of homicides surpassed 900 in the early 1990s.

‘We don’t need a band-aid’

Murders in Chicago are down more than 30% this year compared to 2024 and shootings have fallen almost 40%, according to city data. Both are on pace to be among the lowest levels the city has seen in more than a decade.

However, that still translates to more than 1,200 people being shot and at least 274 murders, which are more than those reported in New York City and Los Angeles – two cities with much larger populations than Chicago.

Rochelle Sykes, who lives in West Garfield Park, the neighborhood with the most reports of shooting victims per capita this year, doubts the magnitude of the reported drop in gun violence this year.

She said, “There’s a lot of things that go unreported, and these are things that us living in the neighborhood, see every day.”

The 59-year-old lifelong neighborhood resident and office manager of the New Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church said as a kid she “would play outside ‘til the streetlights came on” but that’s impossible now. The body of her 15-year-old nephew was found burned in a dumpster in 2016, a year when homicides spiked to a decade-high.

“My grandkids can’t sit outside. They can’t sit in the living room or at the kitchen table, because a bullet may come through,” Sykes told CNN.

This Labor Day weekend alone, shootings left at least seven people killed and 49 injured across the city, according to incident notifications published by the Chicago Police Department. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 48.

Even still, Sykes believes the National Guard is “not the solution” and disagreed the city is a “killing field,” as Trump described it in late August.

“We don’t need a band-aid to cover up the problem,” she said. “No offense to the President, but we actually need someone that’s in this community.”

For her, there are larger, more basic needs that need to be addressed.

“Folks can’t afford eggs or milk or bread, so half the time folks are stealing just to eat,” she said.

Kendall Reed, another gun violence mediator on Chicago’s southside, said it’s clear the city needs more mental health resources, job opportunities and to stop school closures.

“Send those people in. Don’t send the military in. What is that gonna do for us?,” Reed said.

“If the numbers are down, then why are you bringing them in? If what we’re doing is working, it may not be working as fast as you would like it to work,” Reed said. “(But) none of this all happened overnight.”

Unlike them, resident Ameenah Haque would still like Trump to try sending the National Guard.

“The residents deserve more,” said Haque, who spoke to CNN in the Chicago southside neighborhood of Hyde Park, which is home to the University of Chicago. “The crime shouldn’t take over the city. The crime should not make residents feel like they can’t live everyday life.”

Even with the broad decreases, there are certain areas reporting more gun violence than before. In the city’s near north side, 36 have been shot so far this year compared to 20 in the same time period last year, according to city data.

Homicides have more than tripled, standing at 10 compared to three in the same time period in 2024. Those were driven largely by a July mass shooting outside a bar that left four killed and over a dozen injured.

A Chicago hospital likely had its ‘slowest summer’ in years, doctor says

Health care professionals in Chicago told CNN they are undoubtedly seeing the impact of the declining violence.

Dr. Michael Casner, assistant medical director of the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital, said the number of patients treated for violent trauma has decreased in the past couple of years. His hospital is a critical level one trauma center equipped to comprehensively treat gunshot victims.

But this year, “patients coming in with gunshot wounds are down by about a third, patients coming in with stab wounds (are) down, assaults down as well,” he added.

Cook County Health, which oversees another level one trauma center, “probably had the slowest summer” in the last five to six years when it comes to the amount of patients in need of trauma care, said Dr. Lauren Smith, the public health system’s chief medical officer.

Smith credited that success in part to hospital-based violence intervention programs, which aim to prevent gun violence patients from returning to trauma units by targeting social factors that may have led to the violence in the first place. They’ve already seen “decreased recidivism,” she said.

Here’s what police and residents say is working so far

Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling is cautiously optimistic about the progress in crime statistics, but said there are several strategies that seem to be working to help bring down the violence.

Those include having “boots on the ground intel,” using technology “to enhance the collection of intel and data,” creating task forces for specific crimes, like one dedicated to robberies, and bridging bureaus that were “siloed in the past.”

Despite any national tensions between local and federal jurisdictions, the superintendent emphasized the importance of sharing resources between the two, especially through their Crime Gun Intelligence Center, a hub of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors working to address gun violence and gun trafficking.

But even as “numbers” go down, Snelling said people still get victimized and killed.

“If we brought our homicide rate down to one homicide, we can celebrate that,” Snelling said. “It would be absolutely great, except for the one family who lost a loved one to a homicide.”

Hawkins, the violence mediator on the southside of Chicago, said when outright peace isn’t an option, sometimes a “nonaggression agreement” is good enough, like the one he said is in place in his neighborhood.

“That don’t mean that I don’t still feel like that you deserve to die. That just means that right now we have a respect level and the respect is, I don’t like you, you don’t like me, I ain’t gonna come to your hood, you don’t come in my hood,” Hawkins said.

It’s a compromise he takes pride in, he said.

“Last year we had four individuals murdered in the Pullman area at this time this year, 2025, we haven’t had one individual murdered this year,” he told CNN.

To him, this isn’t a job, “This is a calling,” Hawkins said. “I’m helping to save lives.”

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CNN’s Bill Kirkos, Whitney Wild, Priscilla Alvarez, Alayna Treene, Hannah Rabinowitz, and Haley Britzky contributed to this report.