Mike the Mad Biologist

Mostly. The great news is, as of 9am today, D.C. had another week without any homicides, keeping the total for the year at 32*. At this time last year, there had been 68 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, over the same time period, there had been 97 homicides. Good job, D.C.!

That said, as some asshole with a blog noted a couple days ago, the effect of the National Guard occupation has been to decrease car-related crimes (theft from auto and theft of auto), along with robberies**, but we’re seeing a significant rise in those categories, though they’re still significantly lower than at the same time last year. I haven’t really been able to see an obvious geographic pattern to the rise either. It would not be good if we’re still saddled with an illegitimate Guard occupation that also has lost effectiveness.

We are still on pace for another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year, not that one would know this based on news reporting. Because people’s attitudes about city crime are completely unfounded.

Anyway, here’s to a really good week.

*Three of the 35 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).

**In terms of overall violent crime, much of the large decrease in robberies has been erased by the increase in assaults with a dangerous weapon, though I think the latter is largely due to changes in reporting.

Every week, I try to summarize the D.C. crime stats, because we only seem to talk about crime in cities when the numbers get worse, not when they’re getting better. As I point out, D.C. has seen large decreases in four categories: homicides, thefts of cars, thefts from cars, and robberies (muggings). Homicides seem to be part of a multi-year decline, as in the last two years, homicides have dropped by a third each year, and D.C. seems on pace to do that again; likewise, robberies also have dropped consistently over the same period. The car-related categories have experienced huge drops, which would be expected with a bunch of armed guardsmen walking around. Few people are going to try to boost a car when there are more eyes on the street.

But that has been mostly supposition on my part. A recent analysis by the Niskanen Center seems to support my supposition (boldface mine):

We argue that MPD’s improvement was driven not by headcount but by a tactical shift toward proactive, upstream enforcement — though the department left significant gains on the table by failing to concentrate that enforcement where and when crime was most severe, or to adjust dynamically as crime patterns shifted. We also examine the August 2025 National Guard deployment, which added roughly 2,000 uniformed personnel to D.C.’s streets virtually overnight, and find that it produced a real but narrow improvement: a 24 percent reduction in opportunistic property crime in the first six months, with no measurable effect on violent crime…

Washington, D.C.’s recent crime history contains three lessons that speak directly to the national debate about policing.

…police headcount is not all that matters. Crime fell in D.C. as MPD shrank to its smallest size in half a century. This is counterintuitive only if we assume that the effectiveness of a police department is mostly a function of officer count. It is not. It works through how officers are deployed, what they do when on duty, and whether their activities are concentrated in the places and times where they can actually prevent crime.

The second is that MPD figured this out. The shift toward upstream, proactive enforcement between 2022 and 2025 — fewer officers, more arrests, different kinds of arrests — represents a strategic pivot that contributed to a decline in crime. This is not visible in standard staffing statistics, but it is visible in arrest composition data. Giving credit where it is due requires looking beneath the headline numbers.

The third is that the National Guard deployment demonstrated both the promise and the limits of presence-based policing. It worked — but on the wrong kind of crime, in the wrong places, and at enormous cost relative to what a targeted approach could achieve. Property crime deterrence through visible uniformed presence in public spaces is real. But violence in D.C.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods requires something more targeted, more sustained, and more strategically aligned with the actual geography of harm.

One thing worth noting is that the Bloomberg/Bowser school of public safety is predicated around making areas that are visited by out-of-city workers and tourists appear safe because police scare away ‘undesirables.’ This can have some beneficial side effects (e.g., fewer car-related crimes), but it doesn’t necessarily make the rest of the city safer without other policy changes. This is one reason why we see the National Guard patrolling some of the safest neighborhoods in D.C.

Anyway, food for thought. And get the Guard out of the D.C.