WASHINGTON — Six weeks after President Donald Trump ordered a federal takeover of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, expanded the role of federal law enforcement, and deployed the National Guard, the city’s crime numbers show no meaningful drop in violent offenses — and a modest rise in property crime.
Daily incident data compiled from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department through Sept. 21 show violent crime averaging about 7.1 incidents a day since Aug. 11, when Trump announced the takeover. That is essentially unchanged from the 6.7 daily incidents recorded during the first seven months of 2025.
The pattern holds across individual violent offenses. Assaults with a dangerous weapon continue to account for the bulk of incidents, averaging roughly 4½ a day both before and after the announcement. Robberies hover around two per day, sex-abuse reports remain just under a quarter of an incident per day, and homicides average about one every ten days. None of those shifts is statistically significant.
Property crime, however, has shown a clearer uptick. Theft from autos and other thefts are each running modestly higher, contributing to a small but statistically significant rise in overall non-violent crime since mid-August when compared to earlier in the year.
Criminologists caution that six weeks is far too short a window to judge the impact of policing changes. Short-term crime figures can fluctuate with the weather, major events and reporting delays.
In Washington, as in many U.S. cities, summer typically brings a surge in crime that tapers in the fall as temperatures drop and students return to school — a seasonal pattern that complicates efforts to isolate the effect of any single policy.
At a House Oversight hearing last week, Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back against portrayals of the District as unsafe and highlighted the city’s longer-term progress. She said violent crime is down about 53 percent compared with 2023, citing sharp two-year declines in robberies, homicides and carjackings.
“Any crime is too much crime,” she told lawmakers, but added that “we’re trending in the right direction.” Bowser stressed that the downward trend began well before the Trump administration’s August announcement and that “local strategies were already driving crime down.”
The Trump administration has argued that federal involvement would quickly curb shootings and carjackings. For now, though, the city’s own statistics suggest that while violent crime remains well below its 2023 peak, the president’s August initiative has not produced an statitically significant change.
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