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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 Milwaukee-based reporter in October 2024 after starting as a freelance Fact Briefs reporter in January 2023. In addition to contributing to Wisconsin Watch’s collaboration with The Gigafact Project to combat online misinformation, he reports on Wisconsin policy, labor, energy and the rapid expansion of data centers across the state. Kertscher is a former longtime reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and the author of two sports books, on Al McGuire and Brett Favre.