DC Guard Deployment Is 'Blunt, Expensive Instrument'

A military presence on DC streets may be changing what gets stolen, but not who gets shot. A new analysis by the nonpartisan Niskanen Center finds that President Trump's deployment of the National Guard in Washington produced a roughly 24% drop in "opportunistic" offenses such as property crimes and car break-ins, but had no measurable impact on violent crime, including robberies, NPR reports.

• "What the Guard brought was a massive, sudden shock from the visible presence of uniformed military personnel on the streets of Washington almost overnight," the report states. "For crimes driven by opportunistic calculation, that visibility appears to have mattered. For violent crime, which is less deterrable by patrol presence alone, it did not."

The Guard—about 2,800 troops from DC and GOP-led states, many on armed, high-visibility patrols—costs the federal government an estimated $1.5 million a day, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Researchers describe the deployment as a "blunt and expensive instrument" that hasn't significantly freed up DC police to shift into higher-crime areas, one of its stated goals.

• "I think on balance the National Guard's deployment is not a failure, there is success in what they've done," study co-author Richard Hahn tells NPR. "But I guess the point that we try to make is: compared to what? You could get the same or better outcomes, possibly much better outcomes, for much cheaper, if you just were very thoughtful about policing."
• The study argues that there would have been a much more significant reduction in crime if the money spent on the Guard deployment had been used to deploy Metropolitan Police Department officers to crime hotspots. "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," researchers wrote.

The findings land as federal officials prepare to roughly double the Guard's presence to 5,000 this summer ahead of events tied to the nation's 250th birthday. The White House dismissed the report, with spokesperson Abigail Jackson asserting—without offering data—that the task force and Guard have "improved quality of life for countless individuals." Officials have not said when the expanded "summer surge" will end.