Trump put thousands of soldiers on Washington’s streets. They seldom stop crime

Well past midnight one day this spring, three police officers pulled up to a nightclub where a man was stomping on a young woman lying on the sidewalk.

The officers stopped the attack and arrested him, according to a police report. It was the kind of assault police might encounter on almost any night in almost any city.

But one detail stood out to police officer Xavier Jimenez, who wrote the report: “There was approximately 15 national guard members in the area on routine patrol who did not take any action.”

President Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Washington last summer as the centerpiece of what he describes as a no-holds-barred effort to combat crime, especially in cities run by Democrats. Every day, small clots of soldiers in camouflage and body armor patrol tourist-heavy areas of the U.S. capital, including national monuments, subway stations and the area around its professional baseball park.

Since their arrival last August, the National Guard soldiers Trump ordered to Washington have been mentioned in only a tiny fraction — about 1.3% — of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which handles nearly all the city’s criminal prosecutions. In dozens of cases, the soldiers appear not as people making the arrests but as victims of crime.

The roughly 4,500 soldiers currently deployed to Washington outnumber its 3,200 police officers. And they cost more: The Trump administration last year told Congress that sending guardsmen to the capital cost about $1.65 million a day – before officials doubled the number of troops this summer. The city’s most recent police budget was about $1.5 million daily.

The administration told Congress it plans to keep sending soldiers to Washington – though it has not said how many – until the end of Trump’s presidency in 2029 at a cost of $1.4 billion.

To gauge the impact of that deployment, Reuters reviewed every publicly available charging document filed in Superior Court and interviewed lawyers, residents, service members and others who are familiar with their work.

The soldiers mostly responded to minor incidents in neighborhoods that are wealthier, whiter and less dangerous than the rest of the capital, Reuters found after comparing court records to the city’s demographics and crime information. Reuters could find no reference in court records to soldiers doing any kind of law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years.

The White House did not respond to questions about soldiers’ work. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis said Trump’s efforts in the city have “driven down crime, beautified the city, and improved quality of life for countless individuals.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has called the deployment “problematic,” declined to comment, as did the city’s police department.

The National Guard taskforce managing the Washington deployment did not respond to questions about its work or its cost.