Lawfare Daily: The National Guard in Washington, D.C.

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Yet, of indeed, point to A/recruiting. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Harder what I wanted to do was go to the places

“where there is actually more crime in DC and say,”

you know, are there any soldiers here? And do you want them here? Right? You know, if they're here to nominally make the city safer, would you like them to be in the parts of the city

that are less safe? And I did not get a lot of enthusiasm in response to that proposition. It's the law fair podcast. I'm not only Orpa, but executive editor of Law Fair,

with Brad Heath, a reporter at Reuters. So the extent to which we still don't really know, like who tells you where to go every day, who gives you your marching orders, what exactly is the training regiment that you

have to have before you come and are on the streets of DC and is in different different units? I would have thought these would be easier questions to answer. Over a year ago, President Trump sent 800 national guard members to the streets of Washington, DC,

citing a purported crime emergency. Since then, thousands of armed troops have been deployed

“to DC, usually traveling and groups are for or more,”

seemingly always armed. Brad has been reporting on the guard's presence in DC and recently published an article titled, Trump Put Thousands of Soldiers on Washington streets. They seldom stop crime.

We talked about what he found after reviewing thousands of criminal cases charged in DC Superior Court. What he learned from talking to everyone from national guard members to DC officials and how it all maps onto the legal analysis

of why the guard is operating lawfully in DC. So Brad, you recently published a story in Reuters looking into the national guard troops that are deployed here in DC. As law fair listeners know, we've been covering domestic deployments

really closely, including the national guard and deployments in DC have been a, let us say, particular preoccupation of mine. So I'm delighted to have you and to talk about your really impressive work digging into exactly what has been happening.

We have found it very frustrating and concerning from a role of law perspective how much of a lack of transparency there is in terms of the role of the guard in DC. So before we start talking about exactly what you found, I'm just curious what drew you to this topic.

How does it compare to your normal beat and how did you arrive at it? - I read about law enforcement a lot. So I'm interested in kind of how the government is using all this power, but this one was a pretty simple one to me

and it came at it two ways. One is, this is kind of president Trump's signature. I'm gonna get tough on crime, right? You can't get tougher than putting armed soldiers on the street, but also I work in DC.

I take the metro. I come up every day and there's soldiers at the subway stop and I've just been really curious like now that they're here and we got up to like five thousand this summer. What are they doing?

- Yeah. So you went about answering the question of what they're doing through a prism of what they're doing with respect to fighting crime. That was one of the two missions

that was bringing the national guard to DC. That one is the DC Safe and Beautiful mission the other one being the America 250 mission, which was supposed to be for sort of managing crowds and such around the 250th anniversary of the United States

on July 4th. Though that mission was a little bit convoluted, let us say. But you looked in particular at crime, as you say. And you undertook this sort of two-part process that you talk about in the piece.

One looking at a real empirical analysis of court filings.

And then a second doing a lot of just on the ground

So I want to start with the first piece.

Tell us about this analysis you did with respect to filings in the DC Superior Court and why that was an approach that you took. So we started with the idea that if the soldiers are here to improve safety, to deal with crime,

one of the places we should expect to see them is like rubbing up against law enforcement. They're participating in some way in making the city safer. Detaining people, stopping crime, whatever it might be.

And those tend to get memorialized in this the local city court, which is where almost all other criminal accusations in the District Columbia go. So we obtained what are known as bursting affidavance.

They're like the initial charging document for every publicly available Superior Court case

in the year since the National Guard were first deployed,

which is 17,000 in change, charging documents. And went through those to just see, like, is there a National Guard here? And if so, like, what do they do it? What's their role, did they detain someone?

Did they witness something? You know, in a surprising number of cases, they were the crime victims. - Yeah, and as we found also there were a couple where they had perhaps committed crimes.

“- I think they were two where soldiers were charged”

with crimes for off duty weapons possession. Both of those got pretty quickly dismissed by the US attorney's office. - Yeah, so before we talk about what you found in there, did you look at all at whether these cases,

these charges ended up resulting in convictions, or was that sort of separate from your analysis? - We didn't look through the final dispositions in any systematic way. And a lot of them had not been fully resolved.

I mean, you know, some number of these are pretty recent. It just takes months to get through the court process. And some number of these end up with kind of mental health issue that makes even a 20, 25 case take a bit longer. But if somebody's coming up

and like threatening a National Guard soldier, or some of the stuff they're seeing on the street downtown, like it is not a quickly disposed of case. - Right. Okay, so tell us about the numbers here.

What did you find in terms of looking at all of these bursting affidavats, all of these cases? And to what extent did the National Guard show up in one of those capacities? - The National Guard made an appearance in one former

another in 1.3% of the criminal matters that were handled in DC in the years since they arrived. So that's 217 cases out of,

“I think about 17,000 that we were counting at the time.”

And about half of those were the guard acting in a way that you might think, you know, soldiers are doing law enforcement, right, they've stopped somebody, you know, they saw a shop lifter and chased him down. It actually oddly enough,

the last summer I was sitting in the basement in Superior Court and ended up on a bench next to the very first guy arrested my National Guard soldiers, who I think had beaten up a park police officer and then run away and it was some soldiers very early

in the deployment who tackled him. So that flavor of stuff. That's about half of what we found in the court records. - So the overall number is obviously quite small. Did that surprise you as an initial funding?

- Yeah, I mean, well, yes and no, right, because part of what animated this is when I go to work and come home from work,

I see the soldiers, but I've never actually seen them do anything.

But the sheer numbers in this deployment, you know, around the summertime, we got up north of 4,600 troops like close to 5,000. So these soldiers outnumber the sworn officers on DC's police department, like considerably.

And they cost more than DC's police department, considerably on a daily basis. And you know, they're here in a city that's, if you just take the metropolitan police staff in the local police force for DC,

it is the most police big city in the United States by far. And that's before you add in all the other weird things, you know, the capital police, the zoo police, the park police,

“the secret service that make DC, like the,”

you never go around downtown and feel like wow, there are no cops here, you know? So yes, like just the sheer numbers, I would think at some point, they must do something. - Yeah, it's, it's interesting.

It, we'll talk about this more throughout, but depending on the angle you're coming to this question from, there's a way to think of that as a positive thing because at Laugh Fair, for example, we've been asking a lot of questions about whether it is even

legal and permissible for the national guard

And so from that angle, a small percentage of cases

having any involvement by the national guard is arguably a positive thing. On the other hand, as you say, from a wire there 5,000 armed military personnel roaming the streets and standing on the corner

and scaring little kids and all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons if they're not doing anything when they are supposed to be here according to the mission authority and the declaration of crime emergency

that the president invoked in order to bring them here, the numbers are actually showing that. So it is an interesting sort of dynamic.

“- I think there's some view in the district too”

that having the national guard standing around the mall near the White House at Metro stations and not really doing anything is a pretty important victory, right? There's some number of people in DC and in DC government

who don't want the guard to be doing more than they are because that creates opportunities for things to go kind of haywire. - Yeah, talk more about that. Who is of that opinion and what do you think about it? - You know, I've certainly heard in reporting this

and talking to people in the community that, you know, yes, we are not seeing soldiers. For example, East of the River on the other side of the Anacostia from the mall where crime is a bigger problem

and you don't see as many soldiers and a lot of people there don't really want to see as many soldiers. - Okay, so let's shift to these three categories that you used in your piece to sort of explain

the type of involvement of national guard that you've found in the Superior Court and the filings in these affidavits that you mentioned.

So the first was instances where the guards stopped

to the suspects themselves without the involvement of DC police which is much more looking like an arrest. Legally, there's a sort of complicated line between detention and arrest,

which we've talked about in other contexts. But tell us about that one first. So what did that look like?

“Any cases in particular stand out to you in that category?”

- If you look at the type of thing where the national guard is actually out detaining people on the street, it is like when I was a young reporter, I would have to go read the police blotters every day and the police just go to all these really petty trivial crimes.

And that's a lot of what the National Guard has been involved in downtown, right? They have stopped people who have jumped the gates on the subway. They have occasionally gone after shop lifters, right?

So there was one fairly recently where a guy stole two slim gyms like the beef jerky sticks from a CVS. There were about $7 and soldiers stopped him. There was a woman who she was in a 7/11

and drank a 20 ounce A and W root beer. And I forget if it was four or six soldiers detained her, she didn't pay for it. So a lot of these are not very serious crimes. They have also broken up some fights.

There's some assaults that they've sort of put themselves in the middle of. But for the most part, it's petty stuff.

And then there's a second bucket there too,

where they are largely deployed around the subway. So the subway has its own police force. They might be stopping someone in the National Guard will help. They might be yelling, stop that guy,

in the National Guard will be at the other end of the platform and stop that guy. - Got it. And then if I recall correctly, your third category was instances

in which the National Guard were witnesses

“to a crime and that's how they show up in the affidavits.”

Tell us about that category. - There's a variety of cases where, you know, you put enough people on the street eventually, they're gonna see something. So they have seen everything from a homicide

down by the other worth. And all the way to, you know, someone shocking on a statue or a flagpole outside the train station. One of the people was wearing a banana costume, right? They witnessed this.

They were, they told the police, but they saw they did not actually stop the banana costume to chalking. So there's, I think 30 odd cases like that, where in one way or another,

they provided information to the police, but didn't actually lay hands on somebody. - Gotcha. - And that's the sort of thing you were, I might do on the street too, right?

If you read charging documents, they are full of statements from witnesses of store managers and passers by and all this stuff. - Right. I know as you rightly pointed out a lot of these cases

haven't had a chance to actually make their way through proceedings yet, but out of curiosity, do you know if, in any of those cases, National Guard ended up being witnesses in actual trials?

- I had heard that some were going to be,

to testify in a couple trials,

“but, you know, most DC, especially petty cases,”

don't go to trial. They are resolved with a police. So the ones that I have seen resolved have mostly been pleaded out in the way they normally are. - And I'm just curious,

as you're working through these numbers, and it's, you know, a much smaller universe of cases, than one might expect, although, as you say, on the other hand, maybe it's very predictable. But how did you arrive at these three different buckets,

and how did you think about organizing that way? - I mean, the nice thing, sometimes I deal with like millions and millions of records, so it's actually kind of refreshing to deal with 217, where I can just literally read every word of everything.

And it just kind of became clear, you know,

so we started with three, with more than three,

but they kind of collapsed, right? So there's the National Guard actually detainings, like single handedly apprehending someone, then there's assisting witnessing. There's another category with it,

really appeared to have done anything.

“You know, the example with Lead the Peace with was a fairly”

nasty sounding assault outside a nightclub. Not far from downtown, where three cops roll up and find a man stomping on a young lady on the curb outside the club. And so they charge him, and that case is still going on.

But at the end of his report, you know, he makes a point of noting that there were 15 national guard members on patrol in the area who didn't do anything at all. - It's remarkable, sort of undercuts the deterrence claim. - The other bucket is, with the soldiers

of them sells victims, right?

Which was that bucket was bigger than I thought. You know, there was last year, really horrible shooting, very close to the White House, where two soldiers from West Virginia were shot, one of them fatally, you know,

but there's so much every day kind of victimization where the national guard soldiers who are in DC have been, you know, spit on. I think we counted nine spittings. Push.

- Those are actually charged. - Yeah, those are charged. And they tend to be charged as an assault on a police officer because my understanding now is if not all of the soldiers on the street,

at least a large number of them are deputized as US marshals. So to spit on them is to spit on a police officer, which is a more serious charge than spitting on you or me. So yeah, and then there's people who make threats, somebody threatened to shoot them with a bazooka,

which I don't believe he had a bazooka, but that was the charge. There was one, this actually happened after the peace published, but I saw a couple days ago

where someone was just walking around one of the metro stations filming them and was arrested after being asked to leave and not doing that. - Interesting.

So since your typical beat is doing a lot of crime reporting, I'm curious of your sense of whether those charges were similar to what you would have seen against regular MPD, or whether you're seeing more charges or sort of differently nature charges

because national guard were the victims rather than MPD officers. - I don't really know the answer to that. I suspect that if you spit on an MPD officer, you are going to get charged for that. I suspect that if you actually don't know what would happen

if you told an MPD officer that you're going to shoot them with a bazooka while not possessing a bazooka, I probably wouldn't recommend it, right? I don't know, you know, the police tend to take assaults and threats against the police pretty seriously,

no matter who's doing it or when. But some of these are also like, so when you write about crime for a national publication, you're not usually writing about a simple assault misdemeanor. - Right.

“Okay, I have a question that I think I know the answer too,”

but I'm going to ask it anyway, and I will give folks the context that this is one of those things that when you're obsessing over the legal intricacies of whether all of this is even permissible,

you care about things like, what is the status under which these national guard are operating as it title 10? Is it title 32? Is it state active duty and where they from?

Because all of these are factors that influence the legal analysis of whether law enforcement activities are okay. So my question for you, after having reviewed these affidavits

and learning about some of these cases is there ever anywhere any indication of these sorts of facts about the national guard's men themselves? - No, I don't think that ever shows up at all in any of the charging documents.

Maybe it gets fleshed out a little further in litigation, but in a lot of these cases, it wouldn't really matter. The actual arrest is made by an MPD officer.

to challenge your prosecution

“because I tackled you and waited for the police,”

like maybe you could go after me, I guess.

But no, they never really spell that out.

We do get periodic updates from the national guard now like once a week about how many soldiers are here and where they're from and they're 20 odd states. It's been really interesting to me and I don't have a good explanation

for this, a couple states have like one person, which seems like a very small deployment. They are principally but not exclusively states with Republican governors. Now I think we're down to 3,600,

so it seems like the summer deployment is winding down some. - Yeah, I mean, I asked that someone in dress because I would have been shocked if that had been spelled out in the filings you were looking at. But yeah, if they witnessed something,

it doesn't really matter, right? And if it's, I suppose if they help, but if I'm on the subway platform, right? And the transit policeman is yelling like stop that guy, stop that guy, you know, he stole her purse

and I stopped him, I don't have any authority in DC. Well, I don't think that would matter to the prosecutors. I don't know how much it would matter. Maybe it would matter the most in like the pizza stealing case or like they detained the person.

But they basically like sit him down until MPD shows up.

- Yeah, I mean, the question of the analysis from any individual case is gonna be pretty facts specific, but one of the things that we've really been finding as we're looking at this legal question is just that transparency is a major problem.

There've been sort of conflicting explanations of exactly what the mission is that people are operating under and what the extent of their claim authorities are. And this is all in court right now still pending.

So, you know, it would have been convenient, but as I say, quite surprising if any of this information showed up as facts that would be deployed in the litigation to talk about sort of the overarching lawfulness

of the deployments and the missions. - I mean, that's an interesting,

“maybe it'll come out and discover in something, right?”

Because they do turn over even in these petty cases,

like dozens of hours of body cam video and loads of paper. So, there could be something floating around, I don't know. - Yeah, I mean, I mentioned in another podcast that we did actually that if I were a defense lawyer

and my client had been detained or arrested by a member of the National Guard, I would have motions relating to unlawful arrest because the scope of the National Guard authority to arrest versus detain is somewhat contested

and it will depend on all of these factors. And it would be a quite fact specific analysis, but it will be interesting to see if any of that comes out in discovery and how that might inform these broader threshold questions of legality

of the broader deployments than the nature of the mission. - For sure, I'll be interested in the answer, you find to that. - Yeah, okay, I wanna shift over to the reporting you did because this analysis of the filings

was really, really interesting, but I have to say after my own experience trying to occasionally chat with the National Guard who are patrolling my neighborhood and the area around our offices at Laugh Fair,

they do not seem particularly forthcoming with information and there's, there've been a lot of reporters who have had a really hard time just nailing down the facts of who people are, what they're doing, what they're understanding is of what they're doing.

And so I'm curious just as an initial matter, what was the process of reporting, how did you go about talking to people? - So this was sort of multifaceted, right? Like part of this was to talk to people in the community

“and just see like, what do you think of these soldiers being here?”

Are they having an impact? I mean, part of what I wanted to do was go to the places where there is actually more crime in DC and say, are there any soldiers here and do you want them here, right?

If they're here to nominally make the city safer, would you like them to be in the parts of the city that are less safe? And I did not get a lot of enthusiasm in response to that proposition.

And part of the reporting was to talk to people in government and to talk to the soldiers themselves to see, you know, what are you doing? And I have to say like the soldiers are not allowed to talk to the press, we did ask for interviews

and we're denied, but I spent the considerable number of hours out in the heat just kind of chatting with people. They're not hard to find. A lot of them were very receptive to having a conversation.

They tell you where they're from. Very pleasant for the most part, you know, one soldier was, you know, I mean, he seemed thrilled to have been handing out water to tourists who'd overheated.

He was giving people directions.

And I didn't like wearing a short sleeve shirt

“in that weather, and he was wearing body armor.”

So I mean, good for him. I talked to other soldiers who were less enthusiastic who didn't exactly know when they were going to be going home, but you know, any day would have been fine and kind of everything in between.

And then also, ended up talking a fair amount to lawyers and people involved in criminal cases, just about like, what's it like to have soldiers show up in the middle of all this? And that was pretty interesting too.

- Yeah, to go back to the first set of folks

that you mentioned, what did people say about why they did or didn't like having the national guard around for purported crime, fighting purposes? - I heard a lot of complaints that soldiers have kind of harassed people.

You know, some of the stuff is, if you go down to like the Navy or the area, the DC does have a teen curfew. The soldiers have been involved in policing that somewhat,

“like basically not letting teens get on the subway”

after hours. So there's that kind of stuff, but there's also, like this sense of, this isn't really the right way. This isn't what the community needs to deal with crime.

Like the community needs community policing. It needs people we know.

It needs people we trust.

It needs people to solve crimes. It does not need a kind of quickly turning over cast of armed soldiers walking around. So even in the places in the city where I went, where crime has been like a real issue

for years, if not decades, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for gosh, I wish these guys would get off the mall and come over here. - That's interesting.

And in terms of your conversations with national guard members themselves, interesting that you heard a range of liking what, you know, one guy liking what he was doing others not so much, did you have any sense of,

or did you have an opportunity to discuss it all? Why they were there, or they're understanding of what their mission was, the parameters of, what they're doing, not doing, that sort of thing. - Only enough to kind of confirm the understanding

we had from other sources. You know, for the most part, I guess this was probably good. Soldiers were pretty rule following, right? The rule is don't talk to reporters. I'm a reporter, there you go.

But enough people were chatty enough and if we had learned something from other sources, they weren't there to keep secrets. - I see. And did you ever have a situation where, I mean,

sometimes it's visible on folks's uniform if they were there for the America 250 Mission versus the DC Safe and Beautiful Mission? Did you notice any distinction between those mission folks or did that not really come up?

- I didn't really come up. I mean, I definitely didn't notice it. But I was doing this a lot in the sort of height of the 250 stuff, so I'm not sure what the balance of people I encountered was anyway.

- Yeah, I think it's an interesting, I ask only because it seems to me in a number of contacts. There's been sort of a conflation of the mission of those two missions.

America 250 being really crowd control and DC Safe and Beautiful being more at least possibly crime related law enforcement activities. And this came up because Governor Whitmer actually

“had, I believe, called back her national guard deployment”

that was supposed to be there only for America 250 to help with crowds, and she had the sense that they were being used for broader purposes, then that sort of conflating the America 250 Mission with the DC Safe and Beautiful Mission.

And this again goes to the question of sort of transparency and rule of law, whether we have a good sense of who's doing what and under what authorities and scope of mission. - Yeah, that's a good question.

And that like crowd control America 250 kind of deployment, that's not a particularly unusual one, right? Like they're a national guard soldiers in DC every fourth of July for the fireworks because somebody has, you know,

they close this ridiculous number of roads, and somebody has to man all of those barricades. - I heard you would like to see your mobile phone number, but not just that I don't have any of them. Who's with your ex ex-girls Dreaming Abou?

- My second time, Dean? - No, I'm still going to see you.

- Just a little bit. - With mobile phone in real life, Frank, from the beginning of the "Ownemindest" contract, could you say, "For 10 Euro-Emonet"? Frank, no, Frank.

And I'll show you, my friend.

(speaking in foreign language)

“- The last group I'm curious if you can say more”

about the last group of people you mentioned talking to for the reporting, which was people in government. And just wondering among people, you know, if you talked to anyone who is in the Metropolitan Police Department or DC local government, you know,

how they felt about this enormous influx of national guard and facts like how much more it was costing and how that, you know, could that money have instead gone to pay for additional police officers in DC who would be sort of permanent fixtures here

with more direct command and control by civilian authorities in DC and things like that. What came up in those conversations? - Sure, I'll start by saying, like conversations with DC, DC government generally does not want to talk

about this particularly much and it was difficult to get people in DC government to talk about it at all because this is such a complicated relationship for DC. They're under all this federal authority.

They have to live with it. And they also have to manage that relationship like not from a position of power all the time. So, you know, but the mayor has said a couple of times like that this is not how we should be doing

public safety in DC, right, that she was fine with having additional federal agency, right? One of the things the administration did was send hundreds

of additional federal agents who basically behaved

as local cops, especially in the early days of the 2025 anti crime surge. But like ICE, she did not want here and the national guards she did not want here. - And this is Mayor Bowser, you're talking about it.

- Yeah, but the number of people in DC government who declined to talk about this at all was surprising to me. - That's interesting, 'cause I imagine in your other reporting over the years you've had a lot of instances where DC has to navigate this very tricky relationship

with the federal government and the limitations on home role and all of that. So, did you find that they were even more reluctant to speak than in other situations like that? - I don't cover DC government a lot

but I have found them to be more helpful

over the years in terms of providing information and just talking about stuff than they were with the national guard. - Interesting. What about others in maybe not directly

in government but employees of DC, for example, or individual police officers or things like that? Did you get a chance to talk to anyone

“who's sort of working alongside the national guard?”

- Not as much as I would like to. And MPD is not really working alongside the national guard. They're just kind of coming when called. One of the really interesting and still kind of open questions is the extent to which there's coordination

between the police and the national guard. The police work hand in glove with the federal law enforcement who's been searched into DC. Like that's the kind of thing they've been doing day in,

day out for decades. With the guard, it's a lot less clear. I mean, it's less clear even, you know, does DC get a say in, it'd be really helpful if you went out onto the street corner today.

Or it'd be really helpful if you stayed away from here. My sense, they've answered a couple of this question like in vague terms in a couple of community meetings is that they don't really have much control over where the soldiers go, or what the soldiers do.

- And did you get any gauge on how people are feeling about that or if they wish it were otherwise? - Not real, I mean, I'm sure it wouldn't surprise anyone.

“I think if DC had more, would be happy to have more control”

over what's going on within its borders, you know, but I don't really know the answer to that. - And in talking with members of the national guard themselves, did any of them talk about the relationship with DC authorities?

- No, not really. You know, they do call in, we see that sometimes. They have some communication channels that get them in touch with MPD. I think maybe faster than call it.

I don't know if they have a radio connection or something else. Sometimes they do just call 911. But no, they didn't really give us any information about that.

- Yeah, for sure, I mean, for such a big and highly visible thing,

there's a lot we don't know about the just kind of mechanics of how it works every day. - Yeah, how do you think about that? Because, you know, I'm coming to a from a little bit in the weeds legal question that is really quite separate

from the experience of people living in the district, even myself, there's sort of the academic question and how it will manifest in legal challenges

“in the courts, but there's also really what I think”

you were focusing on more, which is what the experiences and whether the deployment of the guard is living up to the promise that it would fight crime. I mean, how are you thinking about all of this? - I thought at the outset, this would be

a somewhat easier puzzle to crack because DC is a relatively transparent local government

and there are 5,000, there were 5,000 soldiers in DC,

like somebody's gonna know what's going on. So the extent to which we still don't really know like who tells you where to go every day, who gives you your marching orders? What exactly is the training regimen

that you have to have before you come and are on the streets of DC and is it different for different units? You know, early on, we saw a lot of military police units here, actually.

Now, not so much, it seems to be more of a mixed bag, though we don't know, even all the units that are here. So I would have thought these would be easier questions to answer. - What exactly is getting in the way of answering it is it just because people will not talk

in a fourth-right manner or are there other routes

that you tried to sort all this out?

- A little of everything, really. Like, you know, there were a lot of questions that people didn't want to answer. There were a lot of people, you know, the National Guard didn't really talk to us or answer questions, you know,

the DC government declined to comment when we asked them for interviews, so there's just a lot of stuff that remains unanswered. - Yeah, it's really consistent with what we've found, as well, just the difficulty in nailing down basic facts

as kind of staggering. I want to talk about a couple of other things that really stood out to me in your piece. And I guess as a big picture matter, you talk a bit about the question

of whether this actually reduced crime. And there is the whole theory of deterrence. We've touched on this a little bit, but under cut a bit by the fact that most guard are deployed in wealthier, less crime,

written areas of the city, but you do note in the piece that crime has gone down in DC. Tell me about how you thought about that dynamic and just how you measured the question in your reporting about whether this hasn't impact on crime.

- Yeah, deterrence is one of those things that's really, really tricky to prove empirically. And we didn't really set out to prove or disprove it,

“but in part because there's still many moving pieces here, right?”

You know, even if you think about the District of Columbia and what the Trump administration is doing here, it's not just five thousand soldiers on the street. It's hundreds of additional federal agents. It's the U.S. attorney changing their charging practices.

Immediately when that happened, there was a pretty notable decrease in public mobility. Like fewer people were taking the bike shares and taxis and fewer people on the street making restaurant reservations.

Unpacking all of that is really complicated, but there are a couple things that stood out as pretty, no worthy one is like, yes, crime is down in DC in 2026 and in 2025 that was also the case in 2024. You know, the murder numbers have been going down a lot,

a lot of the other violent crime numbers have been going down a lot. But murder especially, you know, if you look nationally, we are reaching modern lows for homicides.

In ways that kind of defy easy explanation, right? So Baltimore, which has not had a federal surge and in some sense has had like federal resources withdrawn from the city to bring them to DC is also experiencing kind of record low homicides

in a huge decrease in crime. So how do you unpack all of that? And then in addition to that,

“there's just the physical geography of the deployment, right?”

So we don't know conclusively where all the soldiers in DC are. But one of the ways we went about it is to look at all of the locations of the incidents that they were involved in that ended up in court. Because sooner or later, if you're spending enough time

out trying to deal with crime, it stands to reason you will rub up against the legal system like at least once.

where we could find some evidence

that the National Guard was doing something. And those tracks were generally wealthier parts of DC. They were wider parts of DC. They were parts of DC that were safer, you know, even before the administration started really focusing

on DC crime in 2025. And in particular, like those census tracks, where the census tracks where they were not is where 82% of the DC murders happen, right? So and yet murder is going crime is going down

in the neighborhoods where the guard isn't.

“So I think the deterrence piece is just really tricky.”

- Yeah, and it sounds like based on the cases that you looked at in Superior Court, the vast majority of those in which the National Guard was involved were non-violent crimes. Is that right?

- Yeah, I would say, we didn't count every offense

in part because it gets a little tricky in Superior Court. People get charged with other things. You might have another warrant, too. But there was a lot of non-violent kind of petty property crime that they were involved in.

- Okay, and I just wanted to clarify one thing you said. So overall aggregate crime numbers are going down both in DC and nationally. And the larger percentage of crimes that occurred in DC in areas where the National Guard

was not deployed for the most part. That is not a reflection numerically of the majority of the decline happening where the guard was versus because the guard wasn't in these other areas, crime did not decrease.

- No, that's right.

- Yeah, the guard is not in the parts of the city,

or not spending much time in the parts of the city where a lot of the really serious, especially violent crime problems have happened. And those parts of the city are seeing real reductions in violent crime comparable to what you see

in the neighborhoods where the National Guard is. There's not some clear pattern where if the guard is there, crime seems to be down more. At least based on the location data that we had available to us.

The other thing worth saying though, is that if you look at just like the total number of violent crimes reported to metropolitan police, it's actually higher this year than it was last year. So there has been this very small,

couple percentage point increase in total violent crimes in DC. That's mostly serious assaults. Homicide numbers have gone down. So that that too is sort of a complicating factor. - Yeah, and is it possible even to disaggregate

location of those and map it onto where the National Guard is deployed or not? - The short answer to that is yes. Like DC, DC does publish daily. It's crime data, and you can look at it by neighborhood.

And we did, we tried to look for neighborhood patterns and really didn't see anything strong, but there's so many, you can't do off that a really rigorous study because there are so many other confounding factors.

Think about like park police used to just be by them all. And now they're patrolling all over DC and engaging in vehicle pursuits. And they are used to the river. The feds are in places where there's been a lot of crime

and they're doing gun enforcement and they're doing some drug enforcement. So all that stuff just gets just very complicated to measure. - Yeah, absolutely, I'm really grateful for the analysis. You guys were able to put together to map this out

because it strikes me as a really impossible task to even try to tie these things together.

“And of course, it's important to ask for the receipts”

because this is the whole premise and the whole reason that the troops are supposed to be deployed here. - Well, then you throw the other, there's another layer of the, you keep on top of that, which are the DC crime data any good anyway.

You know, the Trump administration is raised complaints, but the DC Inspector General too has found like shortcomings in how metropolitan police handles its crime reporting. And they ousted a bunch of commanders

and you know, there was another investigation that found they were under some pressure to try to reduce the serious crime numbers in in places that have been the targets of local policing initiatives.

So like, are our data any good? It's tricky to know. I mean, the White House uses some, the district uses them, the FBI uses them, so they, they what you got.

- Yeah, a lot of layers of complexity. - Yeah, it is a complex layer cake. For what seemed like a simple story

“to start out of like, hey, what are these guys doing?”

(laughs) - Well, you got a lot further and sorting that out than I've seen anywhere else.

which was in your piece you quoted General Randy Manor,

“who was the second and command of the National Guard, the RO.”

And he said something about how soldiers are ill-prepared for police work. Can you talk a little bit about what that meant, what your observations were with respect to that concept?

- Yeah, he made two points where we're talking about the soldiers in police work. One was, they just don't have the training that police officers do, right? Police officers spend time in the community,

you know, they go through the academy, they have a training officer, there's a lot that goes into putting a police officer on the street even as a rookie. National Guard soldier, not as much, you know,

they do have training, but it's more combat training. It's not, you know, go, stop shop lifters, go, stop fair jumpers. You know, policing is a very difficult job. Day in day out, police officers are dealing with fellow citizens

experiencing like the very worst day of their lives. You know, they're very worst behavior. Someone else's worst behavior, it is not easy. The other point was the National Guard, when you think about them,

you might often think of the National Guard responding to a disaster. You know, when your house is flooded, when your neighborhood is on fire, and the National Guard shows up, they are unequivocally there to help you.

And his point was, now you have the National Guard on the streets of the U.S. city, kind of keeping an eye on you. Now, you know, they might be protecting you for crime, but they might also be checking you out

to make sure you are not committing any crime. And that's a different thing. And we'll change how people look at the National Guard in their communities, you know,

“and I think he found that, that idea troubling as well.”

- Yeah, and did you hear any echoes of that among the National Guard who were willing to talk with you? - No, not really. You know, to the extent people were talking to me, they seemed like happy to be there to help

and thinking they were helping. - I'm just saying. - Okay, I want to wrap up just by asking you, you know, what do you wish that you knew that you weren't able to find out?

What are the sort of burning questions that remain in your mind? - Oh gosh, I have a long list. Like at the end of every story.

Well, let me back up for a second

and talk about policing, 'cause there's one part of this that I find really interesting, and it goes to the cost of this, right? So there's the multi-billion dollar cost, the administration most recently said,

they need close to one and a half billion dollars to keep soldiers in DC through the end of President Trump's second term. But one of the more interesting charging documents I read was from last year, and the National Guard was at the Capitol South Metro Station.

So one of the station's closest to the Capitol Office complex and someone was stealing hats on the train. He stole a hat from someone who then tussled with him when the train came in the National Guard got on, started to break up the tussle,

and the guy was charged with assaulting the soldier and reaching for his weapon.

We've never seen in any of these charging documents

a weapon come out, this is as close as we've got. What was really interesting to me about that document was they told us who the soldier was. And he was in a military police unit. He turns out to be a decorated police officer

from Jackson, Mississippi, and Jackson, Mississippi for years had a homicide problem that was so much worse like per capita than DCs. They've had a very hard time with that. And also, they have a lot fewer cops than DC.

So one of the costs to the deployment was they had to take an officer out of a quite dangerous U.S. city to have them guard the subway. Those kind of costs are much harder to measure. I'd be really interested in seeing that like more granularity

and who's been here and what are they doing.

“I remember a colleague, when the president was talking”

about deploying the National Guard, went down to Louisiana, was talking to a police chief there, who said, you know, I could really-- I wouldn't mind having some National Guard on my street, but then again, if you call up the National Guard,

that's going to be a bunch of my officers because they also are National Guard soldiers in a military police unit. So there's a bit of a double-edged sword here. I thought that was a really interesting observation.

But you asked about things I'd like to find out. Like I would really like to find out what the level of coordination is. One of the things we've heard is putting the National Guard on the streets, frees up metropolitan police officers

to go do other things. I'm not sure that's true. You know, we don't really have evidence that that's true. It's not like they've left downtown.

I'm really interested in what are the soldiers doing that

doesn't come up against the law enforcement. So you know, it's just what's a day like, you know, we go see glimpses for a minute or two and then they move on. Like, what is today like?

- Yeah, absolutely. A lot of still unanswered questions. - It's surprising, I mean, for like so many people in a town full of curious journalists, right? Like, surely we should have nailed this by now.

- Yeah, and to say nothing of the question of whether

it should be okay as a role of law matter

for us to not be able to get these answers.

“- Well, you know, that's what FOIA's for”

and, you know, come, I don't know, 2035 or something like that. We'll have lots of partially satisfactory answers. - That seems like a long time to wait. (laughs)

- Some places do a very good job, but I, you know, to the extent these deal with the Marshall Service, I got an email from them this morning asking if I still wanted the thing I asked for in 2024, 23, you know, it takes a while.

- It's not an easy be you've chosen. - No, but it's really interesting. - Yeah. - Okay, well, I think that's a great place to leave it. I want to really thank you for this work

because I think you were able to really dive into a lot more factually than I've seen anywhere else and it seems like it took a tremendous amount of work and dedication. - Well, I appreciate that that's very nice of you to say.

It was fun to do. - That's great. Thank you for that, and thank you for joining us. - Oh, my pleasure. - The Lothar podcast is produced by the Lothar Institute.

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