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By Hugh Cameron
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Tuesday will mark one year since President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., and deployed troops to the city to combat what he said was a wave of “savagery,” “filth” and “lawlessness” in the nation’s capital.
The emergency declaration ended after 30 days, but thousands of National Guard members remain stationed across D.C., patrolling stations, streets and attractions, with a recent surge in numbers to assist in the country's 250th anniversary celebrations and protect refurbished monuments.
And this effort has led, according to the administration, to a historic reduction in crime—a correlation analysts acknowledge, even as some remain doubtful that Trump’s intervention deserves the credit.
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When approached for comment, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) pointed Newsweek to a statement from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
“One year ago, an unprecedented federal intervention brought national attention to DC’s lack of statehood and autonomy,” the Democratic mayor said. “At the time, we were in the midst of driving down crime to a 30-year low following a post-COVID crime spike.”
Why Did Trump Deploy the National Guard?
Trump deployed the National Guard to D.C. last August, part of a wider push to make the city “safe and beautiful” through an expanded federal law-enforcement presence and multipronged public safety campaign.
“Rising violence in the capital now urgently endangers public servants, citizens, and tourists, disrupts safe and secure transportation and the proper functioning of the Federal Government, and forces the diversion of critical public resources toward emergency response and security measures,” Trump said upon declaring a D.C. crime emergency last year. “The city government’s failure to maintain public order and safety has had a dire impact on the Federal Government’s ability to operate efficiently to address the Nation’s broader interests without fear of our workers being subjected to rampant violence.”
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The capital became one of several cities to have seen a National Guard deployment, alongside Minneapolis and Chicago, among others. Weeks into the D.C. deployment, Trump told military leaders the government was fighting a “war from within” and that U.S. cities could serve as “training grounds” for the nation’s military.
But the move met major pushback, including from D.C. Mayor Bowser, who responded to Trump’s order in August 2025 by stating that violent crime in the city had already been trending downward and reached a 30-year low before the president returned to office.
“We had an unacceptable spike in 2023,” she wrote on X at the time. “So we changed our laws and strategies. Now, crime levels are not only down from 2023, but from before the pandemic.”
But while initially envisioned as a temporary measure, the administration now plans to maintain a National Guard presence in D.C. for the duration of Trump's second term, a plan that will cost an estimated $1.4 billion by January 2029.
Has the Deployment Brought Down Crime?
Last week, the FBI said on Facebook that federal law enforcement had made “nearly 15,000 arrests” since last August as part of “Operation Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful,” and that these efforts had “brought about an unprecedented level of safety and security for those who live, work, and visit our nation’s capital.”
“President Trump has transformed D.C. from a crime-ridden city into a safe and beautiful haven for residents and visitors alike,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to USA Today.
And by most accounts, overall crime has fallen significantly between 2025 and 2026, coinciding with the initial deployment of National Guard troops to D.C.
According to preliminary figures from the MPD, accurate as of August 10, total crime is down 20 percent in the year-to-date compared with 2025, with property crime seeing a decline of 23 percent driven by a 53-percent drop in motor vehicle theft and a 37 percent decline in “Theft from Auto”—the act of taking property or parts from a vehicle.
However, while homicides are down 31 percent, violent crime has seen a slight increase of 3 percent. This is thanks to a significant increase (41 percent) in the number of assaults with a dangerous weapon that have been recorded, as well as a 2 percent increase in cases of sex abuse, despite a 15 percent decline in the number of robberies.
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John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, said establishing whether the reduction seen in overall crime rates in D.C. would require corroboration from FBI data and comparison with other cities.
He told Newsweek that the available figures pointed to “among the largest declines in street crimes that a National Guard presence could reasonably be expected to effect,” noting the drop in robberies and homicides. However, he noted that other cities in the United States had experienced similar declines without any National Guard presence.
David Weisburd, a professor at George Mason University’s Department of Criminology, Law and Society, told Newsweek that "establishing a causal relationship between the National Guard deployment and crime is virtually impossible without careful controlled research."
A May analysis by the nonpartisan Niskanen Center found that the deployment of the National Guard to D.C. was associated with a significant decline in petty property crime, but had “no measurable effect” on violent crime. Researchers described this as a “real but narrow improvement.”
Richard Hahn, a senior policy analyst with the Niskanen Center and one of the report’s co-authors, told Newsweek that D.C.’s “public safety success story” began in 2023 rather than last August, and said that the MPD deserved much of the credit for this longer-term improvement.
“We looked at arrest data and noticed that during the same three year period, MPD officers arrested many more people in the act of committing a crime rather than after a crime had been reported,” he said. “We suggest that MPD officers have been more proactive, which has compensated for a steady decline in their force size. MPD is making us safer despite a shrinking workforce—that's something we should learn from.”
And others remain even more skeptical that the deployment can be thanked for any recent improvements.
“Crime, like in U.S. cities that were not subject to the deployments, was actually already decreasing prior to the National Guard deployment in D.C., and this is especially the case for violent crime,” Alex Piquero, a professor of Criminology at the University of Miami, told Newsweek.
"And while property crime, especially auto-related crimes, may have seen some decreases during that time in D.C., it is difficult to link the deployment with actually causing any crime change since the deployment appears to have been targeted at tourist areas," he said.
Piquero, a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)—the primary federal agency for recording crime figures—said that the evidence from other cities that experienced deployments “show no effect on crime,” as this was already decreasing in those cities before the deployment began.
“It is important to also note that cities without guard deployments also saw crime decreases, which tends to suggest that the crime decline in the U.S. was a more general phenomenon,” he said.
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This was the conclusion reached by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) in a recent analysis, which found that, nationwide, nine of the 13 examined crimes fell in the first half of 2026, part of a long-running trend that has left shoplifting as the only offense now sitting above 2019 levels.
“Murder and other crime rates are falling across the map, in cities with different political leadership, housing and economic conditions, policing and prosecution strategies, violence reduction models, and levels of federal enforcement activity,” CCJ President and CEO Adam Gelb said in a press release. “Local policies and programs surely matter, but the striking consistency of the decline suggests that macro-level forces are exerting enormous influence as well.”
“Ultimately, the administration's role is difficult to tease out,” Jeff Asher, a national crime trend analyst and co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, told Newsweek. Asher said this task was complicated by the fact that crime was already dropping “substantially” in D.C. and is “down pretty much everywhere at a historic rate.”
“One could probably argue that crime fell a bit faster than it would have without any federal efforts, but you can't really separate it all that much from the preexisting trends,” he said.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Sam Wilson.
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