The National Guard’s presence in D.C. has helped drive down some crime — but a new study suggests it’s not the right tool for the city’s most serious public safety challenges.
Since the guard was deployed last August, overall crime dropped about 24%, according to a study by the Niskanen Center. But researchers say most of that reduction came from opportunistic property crime — not violent crime.
“The National Guard was deployed primarily in high-visibility public spaces, exactly the locations where opportunistic property crime tends to occur and where visible deterrence is most likely to be effective,” according to the report.
But those aren’t the high-crime neighborhoods where violent crime takes root, researchers said, and the deployment hasn’t changed the dynamics in high-poverty areas where that violence is concentrated.
The report says D.C. police had been making significant inroads in high-crime areas before the guard arrived.
Between 2022 and 2025, narcotics arrests were up 150%, traffic stops and violations were up 100%, and release violations and fugitive charges were up approximately 50%.
“These are arrests that require officers to go looking for crime before it happens — stopping cars, executing warrants, sweeping for drugs and illegal weapons, pulling people with outstanding violations off the street,” according to the report. “They signal a deliberate strategy of getting guns, drugs, and dangerous people off the street before violence happens.”
There’s also a cost question. The Niskanen Center said the daily cost of a National Guard member — who doesn’t have full police powers — is almost twice that of a D.C. police officer.
The study concludes the guard has been an expensive way to reduce property crime, but hasn’t substantially reduced violent crime.
“Preventing a murder in Congress Heights, a high-crime neighborhood in the city’s Southeast quadrant, produces social benefits orders of magnitude greater than those of preventing a vehicle theft from a tourist corridor near Union Station at the foot of the Capitol complex,” according to the report. “Any cost-effectiveness analysis that treats crimes as homogeneous misses the most important dimension of the comparison.
The findings come as President Donald Trump announced plans to double the National Guard presence in the District ahead of America’s 250th birthday celebration.
In 2023, Time Magazine named the Niskanen Center as the most interesting think tank in American politics, noting “its unorthodox policy ideas that can bridge left-right divides.”
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