At first glance, the neat, tree-lined streets of Anacostia, with its 19th-century row houses, smart cafes, and murals, show few signs of violent crime. But like some other Washington, D.C. neighborhoods, Anacostia has a serious crime problem and has had it for quite some time.
For Lamont Mitchell, a community organizer and chair of the Anacostia Coordinating Council, a neighborhood improvement group, the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard and other federal officers on the streets of Washington has done nothing to make people in his area feel safer.
“You can see where the national troops are located; they are in places that don’t have a crime problem, like the National Mall,” says Mr. Mitchell, during a conversation at the council’s offices. He chuckles at the irony. “The Mall hasn’t had a crime in the past five years.”
Why We Wrote This
Beyond wrangling over whether sending thousands of federal troops to Washington is needed or even legal, residents and crime experts say targeted community engagement is a better anti-crime strategy.
By contrast, the people of Anacostia live in a small pocket of the nation’s capital that has some of the highest violent crime rates in the city. Ward 8, which includes Anacostia, has about 72 homicides per 100,000 people this year, according to the Washington Examiner. The deployment this summer of what are now more than 2,000 National Guard troops to Washington’s streets shows few signs of improving safety in Anacostia, and dropping citywide crime rates simply aren’t felt in this part of town.
“The politicians can say crime is down 20%, but that doesn’t mean anything to me if I don’t feel safe,” Mr. Mitchell says.
Scott Baldauf/The Christian Science Monitor
When the Trump administration deployed federal troops on Aug. 11, it justified the move by saying violent crime in the nation’s capital was out of hand. The deployment has its supporters – six governors have promised to send National Guard troops from their states – but it has been unpopular with Washington residents and controversial with voters.
A nationwide poll by Data for Progress, published this week, found that slightly more than half of respondents opposed the deployment. But beyond the scuffle over the deployment’s legality or President Donald Trump’s criticism of the local government, a larger question emerges: What anti-crime strategies actually work?
David M. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has studied violence prevention efforts that have dramatically reduced violent crime in Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Oakland, and other cities. He says that it is targeted interventions in areas with the highest crime rates and engagement with the people and groups committing the greatest number of crimes that are the most successful, certainly more than flooding cities with more law enforcement officers.
The Trump administration has tried to portray Washington as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, but crime rates have been dropping here, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Between 2023 and 2024, violent crimes dropped by 35%, homicides dropped 32%, sexual abuse cases dropped 25%, and assaults with a dangerous weapon dropped 27%. Carjackings – a sore point for the Trump administration because of a recent carjacking involving DOGE aide Edward Coristine – declined 87% between July 2023 and July 2025, according to MPD statistics.
But in neighborhoods like Anacostia, Columbia Heights, and the U Street Corridor, crime rates are much higher than the city average. Anacostia’s murder rate, for instance, ranks higher than that of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a drug cartel hotspot with a reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
At issue: How crime data is reported
The Trump administration points to discrepancies between what the district’s government reports publicly and what it reports to the FBI. Washington officials say city police and federal agencies measure crime differently. For example, D.C. police report data on assaults with a deadly weapon, rather than aggravated assaults, which includes attacks without weapons, notes Jeff Asher in his Substack blog, Jeff-alytics. The city also reports the broader category of sexual abuse offenses, rather than the narrower category of rape.
Discrepancies between MPD’s public data and what was reported to the FBI are more likely a data reporting issue rather than an intentional misrepresentation, Mr. Asher wrote.
Local and federal governments routinely disagree about definitions of crime categories, says Professor Kennedy, but he added that the focus on whether crime rates are rising or falling is misplaced.
“Of course we want things to get better this year compared with last year, but if a community is not living in safe conditions, it is still unacceptable,” he says. “We should be aiming for outcomes.”
Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
More than 30 years of research into crime can provide empirical evidence for what works in reducing violence, and what does not. According to Professor Kennedy, innovative, collaborative violence prevention measures, such as Boston’s Operation Ceasefire in the mid-1990s and then tested in other cities, have reliably reduced crime.
“The research in Boston showed that an exceptionally small number of people in the age range of 18 to 26 were connected to 60% of the violent crimes in Boston,” Professor Kennedy says. But rather than rounding up and arresting those individuals, Boston engaged them. Police and social workers and others trying to help stopped to learn about the pressures and the environment they lived in, knowing that the conditions that fostered one generation of offenders would likely replace them with another.
Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
Engagement convinced some of the offenders to stop committing crimes, according to research by Professor Kennedy. The collaboration between police departments and social services, such as emergency-room and hospital nurses and school counselors, helped to identify youth at risk of becoming serious violent offenders, and to break the cycle of recidivism.
By contrast, zero-tolerance policies and intense policing – like the heavy presence of National Guard and federal agents now seen on Washington streets – have few positive impacts and several significant negative ones, Professor Kennedy says.
“When you have local police officers walking the beat, and they are finding out what is going on in the community, that builds a respectful relationship,’’ he says. “What is going on right now with the federal presence in D.C. is very much the opposite of that.”
“Customers are staying away”
Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, says Washington has been making progress in small but noticeable ways, replacing old-fashioned streetlights with smart-light systems that send alerts when lights are broken or burned out. But cutbacks in federal funding, with $20 million in cuts announced over the past two weeks, have hindered the city’s ability to hire needed police officers.
“Putting troops in the streets instills fear, [and] it damages businesses because customers are staying away,” Mr. Lynch says.
Alex Kramer, owner of Dos Gringos Cafe in Mount Pleasant, says that she has seen her business drop since the start of the Washington takeover. “I’ve been mugged before, but I was not as terrified from that experience as I am about possibly being arrested [by federal agencies in the deployment] and not even being sure of my rights.”
In Columbia Heights, Kenneth E. Barnes has pushed for early intervention to help reduce violent crime, following the death of his son, Kenneth Barnes Jr., in a 2001 shooting.
“Violence is learned behavior,” says Mr. Barnes, a clinical psychologist and founder of Reaching Out to Others Together, established in 2002 to address gun violence and its impact on victims and their families. “Children are born as clean slates; they learn from their environment, and we need to go early and prevent that transition from taking place.”
He supports the idea that early intervention, between elementary and middle school, and addressing the needs of students at risk of dropping out of school would do much more to reduce violent crime in Washington than intimidating residents by parking Humvees at the Washington Monument.
“Early prevention works, but that takes time to measure the outcome,” says Mr. Barnes.
For Mr. Mitchell, the Anacostia community organizer, communities would become safer if the federal government used its law enforcement resources to help the community get guns off the streets, instead of in a show of temporary intimidation.
“How does a 14-year-old boy get a gun?’’ he asks. “We don’t sell guns in D.C. So, most likely, it came from a trade show in a red state. Someone buys a gun for $50 and sells it to a young kid that thinks he needs it for $500. That is the role of politicians to solve. That is the responsibility of the federal government.”
