WASHINGTON, October 4 (Reuters) -After mobilizing hundreds of federal agents and thousands of soldiers to the nation’s capital, President Donald Trump has declared victory over what he called a “crisis” of crime in Washington, and floated the idea of using such deployments to U.S. cities as training grounds for the military.
“We have a very safe city now,” Trump said this week. “The country is going to be safe. We do it one at a time.”
Trump has ordered forces to Memphis, Tennessee and told a gathering of military officers that he plans to send troops to Chicago and other Democratic-controlled cities.
What’s not clear is whether Trump’s show of force in Washington has had a significant, or lasting, effect on curbing crime.
A Reuters review of public safety records and interviews with four experts on crime suggest that it is premature to draw sweeping conclusions about the impact of Trump’s deployments. While some types of crime – especially gun offenses – have become less frequent since Trump ordered troops into the city, overall violent crime hasn’t changed that much.
“To make a claim based on a very short-term intervention under highly unusual circumstances doesn’t make any sense,” Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan said.
A spokesman for Washington’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser declined to comment. Bowser has credited the extra federal agents with helping to reduce crime but has said immigration raids and troop deployments did not.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in an email “it is an objective fact that crime in DC dropped dramatically during the President’s 30-day emergency.”
Here is what the data shows, and why it’s tricky to measure the impact of the crackdown.
CRIME FLUCTUATES A LOT
As in most cities, Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department measures crime by looking at the number of offenses reported to or observed by police. To measure violent crime, the department counts the number of homicides, assaults, robberies and sex offenses. City officials and the White House both rely on those reports to discuss the crime rate.
The data are not perfect. Some offenses are reported days or weeks after they occur, or not at all. And reports can rise and fall based on people’s trust in police.
Immigrants make up about one in seven Washington residents, according to census data, and Fagan said some could be wary of coming forward to report crimes while police were working with immigration enforcement agents brought in for the surge.
In the month before Trump’s surge, people in Washington reported an average of about seven violent crimes each day, according to police department records.
That average dropped in mid-August after Trump’s show of force began, to between five and six such incidents a day. But the number of violent offenses went back up to an average of about seven each day over the two weeks that ended September 28.
The number of violent crimes that involve firearms, however, has dropped more noticeably to 65 reports a day, from 97 in the four weeks before Trump’s surge.
That’s too sudden of a change to be passed off as a coincidence, said Peter Moskos, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
CRIME WAS ALREADY DECLINING
The Trump administration claims the crackdown worked because people reported fewer crimes during the surge than during the same period in 2024. Jackson, the White House spokeswoman, said that over 30 days, total crime dropped 17 percent, homicide dropped 50 percent, assaults with dangerous weapons dropped 16 percent and robberies dropped 22 percent from the same period last year.
But crime levels in Washington – and many other cities – were falling before Trump ordered troops to D.C., according to reports from the city’s police force and the FBI.
“You really need months and months of this data to be able to draw a conclusion,” said crime analyst Jeff Asher of AH Datalytics. “If crime was already falling, you did the intervention and it kept falling, what does that show?”
Violent crime in Washington peaked in 2023, when the number of murders reached its highest point in more than two decades. Bowser responded with a new policing strategy which used data to target high-crime areas with extra patrols. The number of reported incidents has been dropping since then, according to police records.
The number of murders has also fallen in other cities. Asher said reports from more than 500 police departments show homicides down about 20 percent through July compared to the first seven months of 2024.
THE SURGE WAS NOT HUGE
Washington already has the nation’s highest ratio of officers to people, according to an FBI report this year.
About 500 federal agents were sent to work with the city’s roughly 3,200 police officers, an increase of about 15%. More than 2,000 National Guard troops were stationed around the city, but they are generally prohibited by law from doing police work.
The total number of arrests rose by less than 2% between July and August, reaching 2,641 from 2,593, according to Washington police bulletins. Those bulletins are the most complete accounting available of arrests by the city’s police force and the vast array of other police agencies that work in the capital. They do not include arrests by immigration authorities.
Similarly, the number of people held in the city’s jails increased by about 7% after the surge to an average of 2,150 people, according to daily counts published by the city’s corrections department. About 2,000 people were in jail each day before Trump’s crackdown began, a mix of those being held until their cases were heard and others serving misdemeanor sentences.
(Reporting by Jack Queen, Brad Heath and Kripa Jayaram, editing by Ross Colvin and Suzanne Goldenberg)
