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Crime has declined in DC. But it has come at a cost

A detained man is led to a Metropolitan Police Department transport vehicle during a traffic stop in Washington, DC, on August 17, 2025. Alexander Drago/Reuters

A detained man is led to a Metropolitan Police Department transport vehicle during a traffic stop in Washington, DC, on August 17, 2025. Alexander Drago/Reuters

One month after President Donald Trump’s administration effectively took over Washington, DC’s police department, surging federal law enforcement and troops across the capital, crime in the city is down, homeless encampments have been cleared, and hundreds of people accused of being in the US illegally have been detained.

But those changes have come at a price. Tourism numbers have declined, some restaurants in the District are hurting for customers, an already maxed-out court system has been pushed closer to the brink with new cases, and millions of dollars have been spent daily on National Guard deployments.

Though Trump’s takeover of the DC police department technically ends Wednesday, the administration hasn’t put an end date on the surge of federal law enforcement and National Guard troop deployment.

The tradeoffs inherent in the experiment in Washington will continue to fuel fierce debate. Advocates for immigrants and the homeless argue the city-wide crackdown has negatively impacted marginalized communities and simply relocated DC’s unhoused population, and Democratic officials have decried what they see as an erosion of civil liberties.

Trump, for his part, has declared the takeover a roaring success, threatening to expand those efforts to other major US cities like Chicago and Boston.

“Washington, D.C. IS A SAFE ZONE IN JUST A MATTER OF WEEKS,” Trump posted on social media Monday, thanking himself and adding, “Who’s Next???”

 

Crimes have dropped — some more than others

After weeks of federal law enforcement flooding DC streets – as well as a National Guard deployment that has cost roughly $1 million per day, experts have estimated – the city has seen a decline in reported crime.

That trend has been starker in property crime reports than violent crimes, which had already dropped steeply in recent years.

 

 

In the first three weeks of Trump’s takeover of DC policing, reported violent crime incidents dropped by 10% from the previous three-week period, while reported property crime incidents fell by 25%, according to public data released by the Metropolitan Police Department.

Overall, reported crime decreased in all seven of DC’s police districts, and the decline doesn’t appear to be concentrated only in wealthy and tourist-heavy neighborhoods or less affluent areas of the city.

The crime trends varied by type of offense. There were three homicides in the first three weeks of the takeover, compared to eight in the previous three weeks, for a decline of more than 60%. Reported incidents of burglary and theft from automobiles dropped by more than 40%, while motor vehicle theft was down about 35% and robbery was down about 19%.

Reports of other theft, however, fell by only about 9%, and assault with a dangerous weapon was almost flat — down about 3%. Some crimes showed more modest dips — there was a 9% drop in reports of other theft, and a 3% drop in assault with a dangerous weapon. The numbers analyzed by CNN are based on the preliminary data available Monday morning and could change over time, as some crimes take longer to be entered into the department’s database.

And the data does not cover all crimes in the city; only some types of offenses are reported daily by the department.

The joint squads of federal and local officers have brought a significant boost in manpower — more than 500 extra federal officers on the streets every night, a law enforcement source told CNN, filling an officer shortage that city leaders have long lamented. MPD largely guides where these teams are deployed, relying on their local expertise to target the city’s crime hotspots.

“This isn’t elaborate,” a law enforcement source told CNN. “The sheer number of officers added to these areas has evidently created a fear among those who commit crime in the city, and they seem to be standing back for now.”

A White House official said more than 2,000 arrests had been made since the federal surge began, and that law enforcement had arrested known gang members, rescued missing children and seized hundreds of firearms.

Speaking on CNN in late August, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who has at times critiqued aspects of Trump’s federal surge, said that when crime goes down, “neighborhoods feel safer and are safer. So, this surge has been important to us for that reason.”

 

Mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser speaks during a press conference to give an update on the National Guard deployment ordered by President Donald Trump, on August 27, 2025.
Mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser speaks during a press conference to give an update on the National Guard deployment ordered by President Donald Trump, on August 27, 2025. 
Annabelle Gordon/Reuters
 
 

Bowser has also questioned, however, whether the surge was largely designed for Trump to impose his immigration aims on DC.

According to numbers shared by the White House, federal agents in DC have arrested more than 150 undocumented immigrants each week on average since early August – up from an average of about 12 people each week during the first six months of the Trump administration, according to a CNN analysis of data published by the Deportation Data Project, a research group associated with the University of California, Berkeley law school.

 

DC courts ‘used and abused’

The uptick in federal officers paired with the focus of Jeanine Pirro — Trump’s pick for the city’s US Attorney — on increasing prosecutions in both local and federal court has created headaches within the district’s already strained court system and raised red flags for some federal judges.

As Pirro’s office has pushed prosecutors to bring more cases to federal court with the most serious charges they can pursue, DC residents have declined to hand up several indictments – including against the man who allegedly threw a sub sandwich at a law enforcement officer in the first days of the surge.

One federal judge, Zia Faruqui, has been a vocal critic of Pirro’s charging tactics, questioning her management of the office, ridiculing what he called an oversight of civil liberties and, in one case, telling prosecutors they should apologize.

“These catch-and-release arrests have caused presumed-innocent people to spend days detained at the D.C. jail,” Faruqui wrote in a filing Friday in one such case. “This goes against our Constitutional norms. And this Court will not be silent when presumed-innocent people are mistreated.”

Prosecutors were forced to dismiss one federal case on Thursday after a grand jury declined to hand up an indictment against a man who allegedly threatened Trump and others in an intoxicated state, telling officers he had “seven alcoholic beverages,” according to court records.

During a hearing on the dismissal, Faruqui told prosecutors he was “appalled by what’s happening in your office.”

“The court is being used and abused to detain people presumed innocent,” the judge said. “We cannot make one mistake, and we’ve had multiple mistakes.”

The uptick in charges has already added strain to the district’s public defender’s office charged with representing individuals who can’t afford an attorney.

“We’re exhausted,” federal public defense attorney Elizabeth Mullin told Faruqui during the hearing last week. “We don’t have the resources of the US Attorney’s office.”

 

US Attorney Jeanine Pirro arrives for a press conference at the US Attorney's Office in Washington, DC, on September 5, 2025.
US Attorney Jeanine Pirro arrives for a press conference at the US Attorney's Office in Washington, DC, on September 5, 2025. 
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
 
 

DC tourism suffers

The surge of federal forces, immigration agents and National Guard troops appears to have negatively affected tourism and restaurants in DC, though industry sources cautioned that it’s too early to measure the total cost in lost revenue.

One challenge is the perception problem: An ex-reality TV star who is keen on optics, Trump and his allies have posted sleek videos of police raids and federal troops patrolling DC monuments, amplifying their actual footprint.

“The visuals are checkpoints, police everywhere, and tanks rolling down the street — which is not our reality,” said Elliott Ferguson, CEO of Destination DC, a private nonprofit that promotes tourism in DC and coordinates closely with the mayor’s office. “We have been dealing with concerns from the leisure market about the atmosphere in DC. That has been the biggest issue.”

Trump’s latest moves are hurting what was an already dampened year for DC tourism, Ferguson said. For instance, World Pride, held in DC in May and June, fell far short of the three million expected attendees. One factor fueling the downturn is that international tourists are worried about facing visa challenges from the Trump administration, Ferguson said.

Planet Word, an immersive language museum located two blocks away from the White House, saw a 22% drop in visitors in August compared to the same period in 2024, spokeswoman Charlotte Clay told CNN. A handful of school groups even cancelled planned museum visits out of caution, she added.

The 22% dip is “steeper than the typical back-to-school slowdown” as the summer season winds down, Clay said, but there are signs that DC locals are still showing up, because the rate of walk-in visitors has “held steady.”

The chief marketing officer at the Museum of the Bible, where Trump spoke Monday at a religious liberty conference and touted the impacts of his DC crackdown, told CNN in an email that “we have seen our visitor intake impacted recently” and “the summer months have been underperforming.”

The museum did not provide data on ticket sales when pressed by CNN.

But its marketing chief, Matthias Walther, said he doesn’t believe the downturn was caused by any single factor. He said ticket sales are slowly catching up to 2024 levels and they’re “very confident” in the museum’s long-term outlook.

 

 

A National Guardsman walks past the Lincoln Memorial while patrolling the National Mall, on September 4, 2025.
A National Guardsman walks past the Lincoln Memorial while patrolling the National Mall, on September 4, 2025. 
Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
 
 


Demonstrators march from Meridian Hill Park to Freedom Plaza during the 'We Are All DC: A National March' in Washington, DC, on September 6, 2025.
Demonstrators march from Meridian Hill Park to Freedom Plaza during the "We Are All DC: A National March" in Washington, DC, on September 6, 2025. 
Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images
 
 
 

Slowdown for restaurants

Some restaurants in DC have also seen a slowdown during Trump’s federal takeover.

The number of seated diners for online reservations was down 2% in August compared to July, and was down 5% compared to June, according to data provided to CNN by OpenTable, the restaurant reservation platform.

Furthermore, August was the first month since at least October 2024 that didn’t see any growth in the number of seated diners when compared to the same month from the previous year. Some recent months saw improvements ranging from 4% to 17% over the prior year — but August 2025 remained flat at 0% growth, compared to August 2024.

“We had 9/11, the anthrax attacks, the DC sniper, government shutdowns, January 6, and now this,” Ferguson said, recalling turbulent events from his nearly 25-year career in DC. “We are positioned to explain to the global and domestic community what the reality is, in terms of visiting Washington, DC.”

The immigration enforcement push, in particular, has taken its toll on the restaurant industry. Business owners in migrant-heavy neighborhoods like Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights have reported being short-staffed in the kitchen after workers were arrested and said that some longtime customers have been staying home.

Despite the data and news reports about the negative impact on dining out, Trump has claimed DC restaurants are “busier than they’ve been in a long time” and said the industry is “like a boom town” because of his actions.

 

Homeless residents remain, despite sweeps

 

Members of the Ohio National Guard patrol near diners on 14th Street in Washington, DC, on August 23, 2025.
Members of the Ohio National Guard patrol near diners on 14th Street in Washington, DC, on August 23, 2025. 
Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg/Getty Images
 
 


A homeless encampment near the Lincoln Memorial is cleared by employees of the Washington DC government on August 14, 2025.
A homeless encampment near the Lincoln Memorial is cleared by employees of the Washington DC government on August 14, 2025. 
Win McNamee/Getty Images
 
 

The crime crackdown and ramp-up in ICE enforcement has had a particularly strong impact on some of DC’s most marginalized communities, advocates say, including homeless people and children of undocumented immigrants.

The White House said at the beginning of the crackdown that homeless encampments would be dismantled and that people could either go to a shelter or face potential jail, creating chaos and fear in that community.

One month in, the highly visible sweeps of encampments haven’t done much to solve the underlying problem — as predicted by experts.

On any given night before the crackdown, about 800 people were experiencing homelessness on DC’s streets, experts say. A new city-run census in late August found about 760 homeless people on the streets, in tents or roaming. The city says more than 80 people have accepted beds at shelters since the Trump-backed surge began.

The leader of one homeless advocacy group, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told CNN there has been a 40% decrease during the crackdown of people coming into their space to utilize social services.

“Homeless people are in hiding,” the nonprofit leader said. “Folks who were living on the street are mobile now. And this means people are going hungry.”

Early in the crackdown, the source said, ICE agents were spotted lingering in a vehicle outside the nonprofit’s building, which was a “huge deterrent” for needy people who typically come there for social services. (ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

 

‘Anger and fear’ as school starts

 

A member of the Louisiana National Guard carries his sidearm while patrolling in Union Station during the back-to-school season in Washington, DC, on August 25, 2025.
A member of the Louisiana National Guard carries his sidearm while patrolling in Union Station during the back-to-school season in Washington, DC, on August 25, 2025. 
Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
 
 

CNN previously reported that DC schools in Latino-heavy areas are taking new precautions as ICE ramps up arrests.

Some teachers now carry their passports with them at all times, and chaperones are walking large groups of kids to school together, for protection.

In Mount Pleasant, the start of school has been punctuated by ICE raids.

One community leader, who spoke anonymously due to fear of retribution from the White House, said neighbors have banded together to fight back.

They coordinate in secure group chats, sharing real-time details about ICE movements in their neighborhood. They also strive to shield local children from what they called “lawlessness and unpredictability,” like by throwing a block party on the first day of school, “to make sure people didn’t feel alone.”

“There’s a lot of frustration, anger and fear,” the community leader said. “The first week of school was tense and scary for a lot of parents. But there was a Herculean effort to make it as normal as possible for as many kids as possible.”

CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Gabe Cohen contributed to this report.

Author: Marshall Cohen, Marshall Cohen, Casey Tolan, Casey Gannon

Source: CNN:::

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