A member of the Mississippi National Guard patrols in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on April 11, 2026. A new study found that the deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital was associated with a decline in property crime but had little measurable effect on violent crime. (Christian Brown/U.S. Army)
Property crime dropped by nearly a quarter following the surge of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital last year, but the deployment had little to no effect on violent crimes, according to a new report by the Niskanen Center.
“It was an expensive tool deployed in the wrong places for the wrong types of crime,” the study authors wrote, comparing the average daily cost of $607 to employ a Guard member in D.C. with the $384 for Metropolitan Police Department officers.
Published last week, the nonpartisan think tank’s report examined crime rates in the first six months after roughly 2,000 uniformed personnel were added to the streets of Washington beginning in August 2025.
While researchers observed a 24% reduction in property crimes, such as auto theft, the troops’ presence produced “no measurable effect on violent crime,” despite a high cost to taxpayers, the report said.
Placing the National Guard in high-visibility public spaces “appears to have deterred opportunistic property offending, exactly the category of crime most sensitive to visible, high-presence enforcement on the street,” the researchers said. “Violent crime was unmoved.”
President Donald Trump deemed the operation a success less than two months after the Guard was mobilized, declaring the city “very safe” now.
The White House on Thursday called the study an “analysis from out-of-touch think tanks written by keyboard warriors” and said it should not be taken seriously.
Trump and the National Guard “have driven down crime, beautified the city, and improved quality of life for countless individuals,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
The Guard deployment was part of the administration’s Safe and Beautiful Task Force, after Trump in August 2025 declared a crime emergency in the city.
Guard personnel were spread across tourist corridors, transit hubs such as Union Station, federal buildings, monuments, parks and public spaces.
One explanation given for the negligible impact the deployment had on violent crime is that such offenses are “more deeply rooted in interpersonal dynamics, social network conflicts, and the more structural conditions of high-poverty neighborhoods.”
“A uniformed presence in tourist corridors and transit hubs is unlikely to interrupt a dispute between individuals with preexisting ties on their own turf,” the report said. “The Guard’s footprint was simply misaligned with the geography of violence.”
Although Guard members were often armed and could detain individuals, but they had no power to arrest; police retained that authority, the report noted.
Their duties extended to traffic control, infrastructure security, clearing homeless encampments and what internal congressional documents describe as “beautification” work, according to the report.
At the time of the deployment, the White House cited a 2024 murder rate in D.C. of 27.54 per 100,000 residents and a vehicle theft rate of 842.4 thefts per 100,000 residents.
Two embassy staffers were killed in Washington in May 2025, a congressional intern was fatally shot near the White House in June 2025, and a federal employee was beaten up by a mob in August, according to a White House fact sheet.
The victim of the beating was a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency staffer who was attacked by an unspecified number of unarmed teenagers in an attempted carjacking, the Associated Press reported at the time.
The Niskanen study describes two crime waves that hit the city around 2023: a spike in motor vehicle theft and carjacking, and a separate rise in murder and robbery.
In 2023, D.C. led the nation in per-capita car thefts. Monthly murder rates, meanwhile, continued to increase through the pandemic and then exploded in the summer of 2023, reaching a rate more than four times the national average, according to the study.
Robberies followed a similar arc, spiking to roughly at 67 per 100,000 residents in July 2023, about five times the national rate of 12.
But crime rates declined after that, and by late 2025, the improvement across crime categories was dramatic, the researchers said.
The drop coincided with a reduction in the city’s police workforce, from about 4,000 officers in 2013 to 3,144 as of early 2026, as the force shifted to more targeted or “hot spot” police work.
Only about 1,200 sworn officers were available for patrol duty around the time the Guard deployed, according to the report.
“In a city that had spent seven years bleeding officers, the Guard more than doubled the visible uniformed presence in a single week,” the study said. “If visible presence deters crime, this was the test.”
According to the report, immediately after the Guard’s deployment, auto and other property crimes dropped sharply and stayed there.
“Both breaks are clean, large, and fall precisely at the deployment date,” the study says.
However, researchers found that robbery and other violent crimes did not follow the same pattern.
Robberies were already trending downward before the Guard deployment with no visible break in August, according to the report, and other violent crimes barely registered a discontinuity at all.
The authors concluded by advocating for a more data-driven, targeted approach to violent crime prevention.
Placing city law enforcement officers in the right place at the right time is more effective than “the blunt instrument of visible military-style presence or sheer headcount levels,” they said.
