The effectiveness and cost of the National Guard deployment in D.C.

Geoff Bennett:

It has now been one year since President Trump declared a crime emergency in the nation's capital and deployed thousands of members of the National Guard to its streets.

As Lisa Desjardins reports, questions continue to mount over the mission's cost, its legality, and its effectiveness in fighting crime.

Lisa Desjardins:

From Metro stations to monuments, these days, soldiers in D.C. are almost as common as sightseers.

Nearly 5,000 troops from more than 15 states currently patrol the capital, a controversial symbol of the president's authority in this overwhelmingly Democratic city.

President Donald Trump:

I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.

Lisa Desjardins:

When President Trump announced the deployment last August, combined with a surge of immigration enforcement, it immediately sparked protests and drew criticism from experts, who said the data showed violent crime in D.C. was already at a 30-year low.

Thomas Abt, Senior Fellow, Council on Criminal Justice: D.C., it's no secret, has had above-average levels of crime for many, many years. But crime at the time of the announcement was falling quite rapidly. So there really was no urgent situation that needed to be addressed.

Lisa Desjardins:

Total crime in Washington has continued to drop over the last year, down another 20 percent, according to the D.C. Police Department. The White House credits the Guard and the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, which it says includes 20 federal and local law enforcement agencies and has made 16,000 arrests in the past year.

But there is debate over the root causes of the decline, particularly if the Guard impacts violent crime at all. Yesterday, on TRUTH Social, the president threatened to sue the author of a study from the liberal Center for American Progress, calling the research a radical left scam.

In July, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said critics of the operation were blinded by ideology.

Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary:

There's nothing political about this exercise. Law and order is something all Americans deserve, black, white, rich, poor, man or woman from D.C. or far-flung places in this country.

Rodney Miller, 50-Year D.C. Resident: It's really unnecessary. It's a kind of a horse-and-pony show.

Lisa Desjardins:

Polls have shown a majority of D.C. residents oppose the deployment, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the total cost of taxpayers so far has been at least $660 million.

In November, West Virginia National Guard specialist Sarah Beckstrom was killed and another Guardsman injured in an ambush-style attack not far from the White House. An Afghan national is charged.

The president has also tried deploying troops to other Democratic cities in his second term, like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland. Courts ultimately blocked those efforts, but Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center says they are concerning and unprecedented.

Joseph Nunn, Brennan Center for Justice: No prior president has attempted to use the military for domestic law enforcement in such a wide variety of ways and on the scale that the Trump -- second Trump administration has attempted to use the military.

Lisa Desjardins:

Meanwhile, in D.C., where Trump has direct control of the National Guard, the Pentagon confirmed last month troops will remain on patrol through the end of the president's second term. The Department of Defense estimated the cost over the next 2.5 years would be at least $1.4 billion.

For more on what the data say about the impact of the National Guard on crime in the nation's capital, we're joined now by Richard Hahn. He is a senior manager for research in the Criminal Justice Department the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Richard, thank you for joining us.

This is not a simple discussion. We will be getting into some of the complexities here, but I want to start with something clear. Major crime is down in the nation's capital. Let's look at some statistics. This is just year over year from the D.C. Police Department, homicides down 32 percent, robberies down 15 percent, car theft down 53 percent.

Again, that's today year to year since the National Guard arrived. In your research, what kinds of crime do you think the National Guard actually affected or impacted?

Richard Hahn, Senior Manager for Research and Evidence, Niskanen Center: Well, the National Guard seems to have impacted mostly low-level opportunistic property crimes, things like petty thefts, people breaking into cars. These are really vexing problems for residents in D.C.

As a D.C. resident, I know that this is something that bothers me and plagues many of my neighbors. However, it doesn't seem like the National Guard had much of an effect on violent crime, which was, of course, the banner issue that they were brought in to combat.

Lisa Desjardins:

That has been going down though. So why do you think it's not due to the National Guard presence?

Richard Hahn:

So the decline in all crimes in D.C. has been going on for the last three years, really since we saw those peaks in 2023. All types of crime had have been going down.

So what we did was try to distinguish between the effect the National Guard had and what was already going on in D.C. And what we found is, the National Guard had a great impact on low-level property crimes. They declined by about a quarter since the Guard deployed. However, there was very little change in violent and other serious crimes after the Guard deployed.

And that's looking at the difference between what was already happening, what sort of the trend looked like before, and after the National Guard got here. So, yes, year over year, all crime types are down, and that's a great thing. That's a wonderful story for D.C. But it doesn't seem like the Guard actually contributed much to that.

Lisa Desjardins:

And you're saying that they didn't have an effect over and above the trend that was already happening.

Now, the White House, and I reached out to them today, they argue that federal officers and part of the kind of program that they put in place in Washington, D.C., one thing that they did was take weapons off the streets. Is it possible that that kind of effect could have impacted violence in the nation's capital?

Richard Hahn:

I absolutely think it has impacted violence in the nation's capital.

I think the thing is that you got to look at you got to zoom back out and you have to look at what's been happening for the last three years. And gun arrests have been going up for the past three years. Arrests involving guns by Metropolitan Police have been going up for the past three years, and gun crimes have been going down for the past three years.

So this is really part of a larger trend that's been driven by our local police department that's not really been much affected by the National Guard's presence.

Lisa Desjardins:

I know that's one of your main points here is, you stress after looking at all this that something that may be overlooked here is the job the D.C. Police Department has been doing.

And you also found and calculated that they have a smaller force now, but yet crime has been going down. How?

Richard Hahn:

That's correct.

So our theory behind this really great trend in D.C. is that police have actually been better at being more proactive. A greater share of their arrests over the past three years have come from stopping crimes that are actually occurring when they arrive, as opposed to waiting in their cruiser or on the corner for a call to come through dispatch for them to respond to.

So they're catching more crimes happening in the act. And that's not something that the National Guard would really be good at. The National Guard tend to be untrained as professional police officers. Their duties entail a whole lot of other things besides policing, things like traffic safety, greening and cleaning.

And as it turns out, they have no arrest power. They can simply detain someone. So a National Guard troop should really not be judged by the same standards as of a police officer. You get much more crime prevention out of a police officer than you do out of a National Guard soldier.

Lisa Desjardins:

And you sound like, in the police conversation, you're seeing less reactive policing, more proactive policing, make a difference in Washington.

Richard Hahn:

That's correct.

Lisa Desjardins:

To finish this conversation about the National Guard, they did have a positive effect, as you say, on things like carjacking that are important to so many people, but it will cost. Did you look at sort of the efficiencies here and how that worked?

Richard Hahn:

Yes, we did. The National Guard is very costly.

So, per person, the National Guard costs a little bit over $600 a day, and that's because not only do we have to pay their salaries, but we also have to feed them, clothe them, transport them. And outside of that $600 figure, there's also a hidden cost to the economy in terms of people leaving their civilian jobs to do their tour with the Guard and also leaving their families, and that can't be captured in the figures that Congress released that on which we based the...

Lisa Desjardins:

That's expensive.

Richard Hahn:

It's a very expensive intervention, whereas a police officer in D.C., which is a relatively expensive place to police, is still under about $400 a day.

So that's a considerable difference in cost, and you get much more crime prevention out of a police officer than you do out of a soldier.

Lisa Desjardins:

Richard Hahn, thank you so much for looking at this, not a simple topic, but you're helping us understand it better.

Richard Hahn:

My pleasure. Thanks again.