What was the crime rate in DC before and after the National Guard deployment in 2021?

1. Short-term shock: Dramatic drops reported in the days after deployment

Analyses that focus on the immediate aftermath of the Guard deployment document large, rapid declines in reported offenses. CBS News reported that violent crime decreased “by almost half” in the 19 days following the deployment, with burglaries and auto thefts falling by about 48% and 36% in that same short window ^[1]. Another analysis looking at 30-day windows found property crime down ~18% and violent crime down ~17% compared with the prior month ^[2]. These figures suggest a pronounced immediate association between the Guard presence and reduced reported incidents, and the short-window magnitude is notable; it is the clearest quantitative signal that temporally coincides with the deployment ^{[1] [2]}.

2. The longer arc: 2021 in context shows mixed movement and an uptick in homicides

When placing 2021 inside a broader timeline, the pattern is less uniform. Metropolitan Police Department tallies show 226 homicides in 2021 versus 198 in 2020, indicating that the calendar year that included the deployment actually recorded a homicide increase year-over-year ^[3]. Published aggregated crime-rate metrics for 2021 put the violent crime rate at 597.06 and property crime at 3523.34 per 100,000, numbers that are interpretable only against multi-year baselines ^[5]. The coexistence of a short-term trough after deployment and a higher annual homicide total illustrates the difference between temporal coincidence and annualized trends and highlights why yearly summaries can mask sharp intra-year shifts ^{[5] [3]}.

3. The counterpoint: preexisting downward trends and attributional caution

Multiple analyses emphasize that crime was already moving downward in D.C. before and after the deployment, complicating causal claims. City-level data and later-year summaries show substantial declines by 2024–2025—one analysis cites a 35% drop in total violent crime in 2024 versus 2023 and a 32% decline in homicides—which post-date the 2021 intervention and involve many policy and social variables ^{[6] [4]}. Reporters and analysts therefore warn that short-run correlations can be confounded by seasonality, changes in reporting, policing practices, population shifts, and other interventions, meaning that the Guard’s role cannot be isolated without rigorous statistical controls ^{[6] [2]}.

4. Cost, scale, and policy tradeoffs behind the numbers

Analyses that quantify operational costs note the deployment was expensive—roughly $1 million per day in one estimate—prompting debate about cost-effectiveness relative to observed short-term crime reductions ^[2]. Policymakers weighing the evidence face a tradeoff: the immediate public-safety signal and rapid declines in reported offenses versus the fiscal cost and uncertain long-term impact. This fiscal context matters for interpreting the numbers: a large short-term decline may be politically and operationally consequential, but its value depends on durability, equity implications, and whether less costly measures could have delivered similar outcomes ^[2].

5. Bottom line: measurable short-term declines, ambiguous long-term causal picture

Synthesizing the analyses yields a clear empirical statement: there were measurable and sometimes large short-term declines in multiple crime categories immediately after the 2021 National Guard deployment, with reported reductions of roughly 17–50% across different windows and offenses ^{[1] [2]}. However, annualized data and multi-year trends show a more complex story—2021 included a homicide increase versus 2020, and larger declines materialized later in 2024–2025—so the evidence does not establish a robust causal link between the deployment and sustained crime reduction without further controlled analysis ^{[3] [4] [6]}. Claims that the deployment “caused” the long-term drop in crime overstate what the current data demonstrate.