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Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

National Guard troops, like those President Donald Trump is using to crack down on big-city crime, generally are not trained in law enforcement.

Trump sent National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in August as a crackdown. The Milwaukee police union president said he might ask Trump to send troops to Milwaukee.

D.C. police get 21 modules of criminal procedure training, and Guard members get none, an analysis found.

The Guard’s primary law enforcement training is crowd control, said the analysis’ co-author, Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

U.S. Naval War College professor Lindsay Cohn, a civil-military relations expert, said most Guard members are not trained in law enforcement, but some are spot-trained.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, head of the Wisconsin National Guard, said Guard members are the “wrong people” to fight crime because they’re not trained police officers.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

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Tom Kertscher joined Wisconsin Watch as a full-time reporter in October 2024. He started as a fact checker in January 2023 and contributes to our collaboration with the The Gigafact Project to fight misinformation online. Kertscher is a former longtime newspaper reporter, including at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He is a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and sports freelancer for The Associated Press.