Trump Is Taking Credit for D.C.'s Crime Drop. Here's What the Data Say.

“Washington D.C. went from High Crime to NO CRIME — Thank you President Trump!” reads a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump in July. The president has attributed the district’s drop in crime to his deployment of the National Guard, but a recent report says otherwise. 

In the year since the National Guard arrived in the nation’s capital, it was mentioned in just 1.3 percent of criminal prosecutions, Reuters reported. Most Guard activity took place “near the city’s core,” with “little evidence” of a presence in high-crime neighborhoods. Court records show no reference to Guard troops assisting law enforcement in the neighborhoods where nearly 82 percent of the city’s murders occurred in the past five years.

Soldiers were “more likely to be mentioned in arrest records” in high-income, college-educated neighborhoods, Reuters adds. And when troops did appear in criminal cases, they often acted as witnesses, “sometimes simply watching until police officers arrived.”

More often than not, D.C. residents have seen guardsmen standing idly in front of National Parks, metro stops and tourist attractions, or doing “municipal chores,” reports Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward.

On the few occasions when guard members have interacted directly with residents, it hasn’t always been a pleasant experience for either side. Last August, a man was accused of spitting on two South Carolina National Guardsmen. In May, members of the Idaho National Guard wrongfully arrested Anna King—a retired Army captain and recipient of a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star—allegedly without a warrant, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Guard troops have also detained people for petty thefts involving stolen pizza, beef jerky sticks, and root beer. 

While data show the Guard’s presence in D.C. may correlate with a decline in opportunistic crimes such as carjackings and robberies, it has come at a prohibitive cost of $1.65 million per day, according to a February report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. 

Brig. Gen. Leland Blanchard, the interim commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, has defended the deployment, saying troops in D.C. have performed CPR, administered Narcan to overdose victims, applied tourniquets to gunshot wounds, rescued lost children, and stopped fights before they escalated to further violence. 

Still, forcing taxpayers to cough up millions of dollars for a 4,000-person force of overqualified medics in D.C. is not a good use of public money. The Trump administration disagrees and says it plans to keep at least 2,500 National Guard troops in the district through the end of Trump’s term for $1.4 billion.

Washington, D.C.—like much of the country—is seeing a significant decline in violent crime, thanks to a concerted effort by the Metropolitan Police Department to engage in proactive, problem-oriented policing in the city’s highest-crime corridors. 

As its latest crime data suggest, D.C. still has a long way to go before it can be considered a city with “NO CRIME,” but clearly the president’s costly and ineffective National Guard deployment is not the best way to get there. 

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