This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to send “feds” to Chicago over a rise in shootings in the city, escalating a feud with the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel.

“If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds,” Trump tweeted.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible "carnage" going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!

Earlier this month, Trump suggested that Chicago would need federal assistance, tweeting: “Chicago murder rate is record setting – 4,331 shooting victims with 762 murders in 2016. If Mayor can’t do it he must ask for Federal help!”

Neither tweet was clear about what the president meant with the abbreviation “feds”, which could mean the FBI, national guard or a variety of other federally backed services. The Obama administration had already assigned dozens of federal agents to assist the city, including 52 agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and about 120 FBI agents.

In his earlier tweet, Trump wrongly said the murder rate was “record setting”; in the second, he accurately cited the number of shootings in Chicago this year, according to a tally kept by the Chicago Tribune.

On Monday, Emanuel, who served as Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff before becoming mayor, derided Trump for the new president’s continuing preoccupation with the crowd sizes at his inaugural address last Friday.

“You didn’t get elected to debate the crowd size at your inaugural,” Emanuel told reporters. “You got elected to make sure that people have a job, that the economy continues to grow, people have security as it relates to their kids’ education. It wasn’t about your crowd size. It was about their lives and their jobs.”

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Emanuel added that American families did not care about crowd size, saying: “They were talking about jobs, education, healthcare, security.”

Earlier this month, a spokesman for Emanuel’s office said that the mayor agreed that “the federal government has a strong role to play in public safety”, listing federal funding for summer jobs and at-risk youth, passing gun laws and “holding the criminals who break our gun laws accountable for their crimes”.

Trump used the word “carnage” to characterize the United States in his inaugural speech, last Friday, although crime rates around the country remain low. The FBI reported a 10.8% single-year increase in homicides in 2015, largely due to violent crime in a handful of cities, including Chicago, Washington DC and Baltimore, while crime remained near historic lows in New York, Los Angeles and other cities.

During his campaign, Trump suggested that Chicago should use stop-and-frisk police tactics, a controversial practice that a federal judge in New York ruled unconstitutional in 2013. Last week the justice department found that Chicago’s police were regularly responsible for using force that was “unjustified, disproportionate and otherwise excessive”.

