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According to President Donald Trump, Washington, D.C., is a hellscape. It’s ridden with crime driven by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth,” so the White House is intervening. The president, superseding the D.C. mayor and local law enforcement, has decided to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to our nation’s capital. There’s just one glaring problem with this narrative: Violent crime in D.C. has been declining and is on track to hit a 30-year low.

On Tuesday during a White House press briefing, Trump, flanked by members of his Cabinet, announced that 800 National Guard troops would be deployed to D.C. to restore “law, order, and public safety.” He referenced a 19-year-old staffer of the Department of Government Efficiency—famously known as “Big Balls”—who was reportedly recently attacked in a carjacking. Leveraging the federal government’s authority over the District, the president is expected to order the National Guard to remain in D.C. for at least the next 30 days.

The reality of what’s happening in D.C. is not quite as bleak as Trump would have us believe, according to Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. He’s authored a book about urban violence and how to combat it, and is also a senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice in D.C. I spoke with him to understand what to make of D.C.’s crime and how the Trump administration is attempting to solve it. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shirin Ali: The president claimed that Washington, D.C., has a higher murder rate than some of the worst places in the world. Is that true?

Thomas Abt: The best way to compare crime rates is per 100,000 residents, so that you’re getting an apples-to-apples number and it’s not thrown off by the size of the jurisdiction. For the last official data we have for 2024, D.C. had 187 homicides, and that converts to about 27 homicides for every 100,000 residents. That is significantly above the average for large cities, which is slightly over 10. It doesn’t put D.C. in the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States, but it is significantly above average.

I think that it’s important to have a nuanced response to a lot of the fearmongering that has been happening. There is cause for concern when it comes to crime in D.C., but the timing of the president’s announcement is questionable, considering that there have been dramatic drops in homicide, assaults with deadly weapons, robberies, and other violent crime, significantly over the past 18 months. The question is, why do this now? Various measures of crime peaked in D.C. in 2023, and that was disturbing, because at the time nationally, the crime wave was starting to ebb, and D.C. was still going up. Ultimately, D.C. has conformed to the trend and is now actually........

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