By the Numbers: Has Federal Action in DC Reduced Crime?
Federal action in DC likely saved about 18 lives so far
In August, President Trump sent the National Guard to DC. He also invoked an emergency law to federalize control of DC’s police force for one month. Arrests, and federal prosecutions, also rose.
Did that have an impact on crime?
I haven’t seen anyone else analyze that, so I pulled up the numbers.
Below, the gray lines show cumulative DC homicides in 2024. The blue lines show the same for 2025, up until August 11. The green lines show what happened after National Guard deployment on August 11.
On its face, the graph shows a clear fall in DC homicides starting around when the National Guard was deployed, and the decline has continued through November.
Homicide data is generally the most reliable data, as underreporting is unlikely to be a major problem (in contrast, data for lesser crimes also reflect whether a crime victim thinks police will actually do anything about their stolen bike or graffitied door.)
Using linear regression on the 2025 pre-intervention months (that’s the dotted blue line above) suggests that, if pre-August 11 trends had continued, there would’ve been 112 homicides by September, 126 by October, and 136 by November 4.
Instead, we’ve seen 118 by November 4.
This suggests that approximately 18 lives have been saved due to federal action, and that the impact is ongoing.
Visually, it’s the gap between the dotted blue line and the last green bar.
I like the cumulative graph above, because it helps visualize the trendline — but here’s what the raw homicide numbers look like:
Could the decline in murders instead be attributed to some nationwide decline that began at the same time? To get a sense, I pulled up data for NYC, as that city also offers nearly-live data:
We see no post-August decline in NYC, which is in line with the hypothesis that the federal DC actions caused a crime reduction.
In a couple of months, tools like the “Real Time Crime Index” will provide preliminary nationwide data, but for now, NYC gives us that quick sanity check.
What about violent and property crime?
As noted, crimes less serious than murder can suffer from reporting issues. But I took a look anyway.
Here’s violent crime:
A linear regression projects 2,160 violent crimes reported by Nov 4, based on pre-intervention trends. Instead, there were 2,140. So basically no difference.
For property crime, we get a similar result: There would’ve been 18,877 property crimes in DC, had pre-August 11 trends continued. Instead, there were 18,795. So, again, slightly lower but basically the same trend.
It is possible that actual crime fell, but was compensated for by an increase in willingness to report crimes. However, we don’t have the data to determine that.
Implications
The visible decline in homicides that aligns with federal action in DC suggests that something worked, saved about 18 lives, and is on track to save more.
Regarding the 18 lives saved so far, that works out to about one life every 5 days over the 85-day period since the federal actions in DC began. Media reports claim that the cost of National Guard deployment in DC is about $1.8 million a day, and some federal government agencies have, in recent years, put the value of a life at about $13.7 million.
Those numbers suggest that the federal actions pass a cost-benefit test, when looking purely at monetary cost and lives saved.
It also suggests that law-and-order is undersupplied generally, when even an emergency action passes such a cost-benefit test. If local and state governments were to take street crime seriously by hiring more police, prosecutors, and judges, that could be even more cost-effective in the long run. It would also have compounding positive effects, as broader culture started to reflect that fact that crime doesn’t pay.
The data don’t make clear whether the shift was due to the National Guard deployment (which allows police resources to be freed up, among other things), the increase in prosecutions, or another policy aspect. Perhaps all those things contributed to an environment where criminals wanted to lay low and not murder people.
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