SANTA FE, N.M. — Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s move to send the National Guard to Albuquerque to help curb crime is highly unusual. 

We’ve seen the governor send a surge of state police to the metro a handful of times, usually after a crime-related tragedy, but the National Guard usually serves a much different purpose.

So, just how unusual is it to mobilize the National Guard to tackle crime? When we called our history buff, he said he cannot find a single instance where the National Guard was used like this. That’s because typically the National Guard is called in to help with an acute, narrowly specific problem.

• June 1967 – In Tierra Amarilla a group of armed land grant activists raided the courthouse after claiming the district attorney violated their rights. The National Guard members were mobilized to restore order.
• April 1970 – They were called in to deal with UNM students staging a massive protest to Nixon’s military action during the Vietnam War. Police arrested 131 people. The New Mexico National Guard was used for several days.
• February 1980 – The New Mexico National Guard helped retake the State Penitentiary after a violent riot where prisoners took 12 officers hostages.
• June 2022 – National Guard was used to fill and deliver sand bags in northern New Mexico after the state’s largest wildfire put communities at risk of flooding.

This executive move is putting the National Guard in roles that police are doing now, and some people see a big problem with that. 

“Those are inherently police functions. So when we talk about the National Guard isn’t trained as a police force, it seems to me that this is not just augmenting, it’s actually doing police work. It may be freeing police officers to do, you know, sort of the street policing that we don’t have enough of,” said UNM Law Professor Josh Kastenberg. “To make a deceleration or a crime crisis and then use the guard to come in, that’s a temporary measure at best.”