On a recent Saturday, Starburst Plaza was something it’s often not: quiet.
A few people sat on benches on the triangular plot that stands at the five-way intersection of H Street, Florida Avenue, Maryland Avenue, Benning Road and Bladensburg Road Northeast. But they were overshadowed by the pair of military Humvees posted on one end of the plaza, with a half-dozen members of the National Guard standing alongside them.
They mostly kept watch, occasionally handing passers-by bottles of water, posing for pictures, and, at one point, yelling at a man to put down a rock as a potential argument seemed like it would escalate into a fight.
“This is the first time I’ve seen them sit right here,” said Omar Nash, a resident of the nearby Carver-Langston neighborhood who was on his way home from his job with the U.S. Postal Service. “I don’t understand why this is right here, why they have the trucks and stuff. That’s weird to me.”
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But Nash also seemed both underwhelmed and unperturbed by the National Guard’s presence in the plaza, saying it made him feel neither threatened nor any safer.
“It doesn’t make a difference at all,” he said.
It’s been a year since President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard into D.C. as part of an effort to fight what he said were unacceptably high levels of crime. What started as a deployment of 800 troops — largely from the D.C. National Guard — has expanded as of early August to 4,630 troops, including from 15 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The Guard’s presence has spurred loud protests and spawned ongoing litigation from the city’s attorney general to get them out, with many D.C. residents fretting that the National Guard is ill-equipped to police the city, and worrying that at worst Trump could more aggressively turn the troops against them.
Trump hasn’t only grown the National Guard’s numbers in D.C.; he has also expanded its deployment here until 2029. And as the Guard’s presence has grown, it has also become a new, if uncomfortable, norm for many residents — one made more frustrating by the city’s lack of control over the decision.
“We don’t have no say in that shit,” said a frustrated resident in Anacostia, who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly. “Even if the majority say no, it’s still going. Why is that possible?”
Groups of troops — many of them in their late teens and early 20s, roughly 60% of whom come from Republican-led Southern states — walking around the city’s neighborhoods are now a common sight; they’ve been spotted in Georgetown, Petworth, Trinidad, Capitol Hill and Columbia Heights, to name a few. They’re also showing up in parts of the city where hyperlocal problems have flared up: They deployed to Starburst Plaza after dozens of overdoses and posted up last week in LeDroit Park after a fatal shooting sparked fears of a retaliatory cycle of gun violence.
At least 2,000 of the Guard members posted in D.C. will soon be immediate neighbors of many residents; the federal government said it would be spending $292 million to house the troops in apartments across the city over the next year.
“They’re nice overall,” said a man outside the Anacostia Metro station last week, where a pair of National Guard members stood nearby. “They’re helping in a certain way.”
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But civil rights advocates and some elected officials say that creeping normalization is precisely the danger.
“The idea that we are acclimating ourselves to armed National Guard members walking through our streets is perhaps the greatest risk of this deployment,” says Michael Perloff, an attorney for the ACLU of D.C. who is currently representing a D.C. resident and veteran who says she was assaulted and arrested by National Guard troops at her home in May.
“Because once you accept that the way you’re going to be policed is through armed military men,” he adds, “you’ve accepted a categorical escalation in the way that law enforcement is conducted.”
‘Extremely Expensive Photo Op’
The National Guard’s initial deployment in D.C. was nominally meant to assist the Metropolitan Police Department and federal law enforcement agencies to, as Trump said it, “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, squalor, and worse” — even though D.C. officials countered that crime rates were decreasing quickly through Trump’s first year, before the deployment even happened.
“The spin has always been public safety, but anybody paying attention knows that crime was dropping before this,” said Robert White, a D.C. Council member who is poised to become the District’s next Congressional delegate.
During its first months, the Guard’s mission seemed disjointed. Troops patrolled commercial areas and tourist hubs like Union Station, leaving residents and local officials to sardonically marvel at how a crime-fighting mission avoided the city’s most violent neighborhoods. Within weeks, the mission inexplicably expanded to citywide maintenance tasks: cleaning parks, fixing benches and laying down mulch.
“Extremely expensive photo op, and you’re paying for it,” tweeted D.C. police officer and former National Guard member Daniel Hodges.
While the removal of 500 tons of debris may have seemed to some a stretch of the National Guard’s mission, the U.S. Army said those tasks represented “visible proof of a unified commitment to restoring public trust, improving quality of life, and ensuring that the capital reflects the pride and dignity worthy of representing the American people.”
Over time, the mission also became more neighborhood-focused, with troops dispatched to areas experiencing overdoses or other public safety concerns, and even to help enforce teen curfew zones in late 2025 and earlier this year. Troops revived a mother who passed out in her car, helped a man who passed out in a Metro station and — as a NOTUS reporter watched — picked up litter at Starburst Plaza. Randy Clarke, general manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said last week that the National Guard has been “more eyes and ears” in the system, helping make it safer for riders.
Whether that outlay of troops and taxpayer dollars has accomplished the goal of helping lower crime in D.C. is a hotly contested topic. Trump certainly seems to think it has made the city safer. “Washington D.C. went from High Crime to NO CRIME,” he posted on Truth Social last month. Per MPD data, property crime has dropped 23% so far this year, compared to the same period last year. Violent crime is actually up 3%, though, largely driven by a significant spike in assaults with deadly weapons. At the same time, homicides are down 32%.
Independent researchers, however, say the federal surge appears to have accomplished something both measurable and narrow: an accelerated drop in opportunistic property crime, without a corresponding reduction in violent crime.
While crime was already declining before the troops arrived, a Niskanen Center analysis found that the broader federal emergency response coincided with a roughly 24% reduction in property crime during its first six months. Researchers cautioned they cannot isolate the Guard’s exact impact from the rest of the federal response, but noted the drop was most pronounced around transit hubs and commercial corridors where troops maintained a visible presence. Violent crime, however, remained unaffected.
“It does seem like low-level property crimes is something that really responds to manpower; if the guard goes away, we’ll lose that manpower,” said Richard Hahn, a senior manager for research and evidence at the Niskanen Center. But, he added, “it’s a really, really expensive way to keep low level property crimes under control — and by the way, these crimes are trending down anyway.”
‘Very Mixed Responses’
Brig. Gen. Leland Blanchard, the commander of the National Guard deployed in D.C., argues that his troops’ successes in the city are real and measurable.
Speaking during a news conference in early August, Blanchard said that over the past year the troops have provided 788 medical assists, reunited 43 lost children with their families, intervened in 262 altercations before they escalated further, and administered Narcan to 325 individuals. He added that the Guard also supported other law enforcement agencies 479 times over the year.
“The National Guard does not replace law enforcement,” Blanchard said. “We expand operational capacity, strengthen the ability to serve and provide additional capabilities during extraordinary circumstances.”
Blanchard said that the Guard’s presence at Starburst Plaza served that role; otherwise, MPD officers would have had to remain on site to ensure that no more overdoses happened. The Guard did the same last week in LeDroit Park, where it deployed two Humvees and eight Guard members.
“There were very mixed responses,” Matt Fay, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in LeDroit Park, said of the Guard’s appearance in the neighborhood. “There were a number of people who said they appreciate it, but a number of people who said it made them nervous.”
Bethany Young, the deputy director of the D.C. Justice Lab, finds herself in the latter group, and said that while the presence of the Guard may discourage someone from stealing a car near a Metro station, it leaves the root causes of violence unaddressed.
“It’s dangerous to equate quiet, or things we can’t see, with safety,” Young says. “The decrease in opportunistic crime is not an indication that there has been a change in the preconditions that lead to crime.”
Brown Woodland, a violence interrupter in LeDroit Park, takes a nuanced view of having the Guard in D.C. posted in his neighborhood. “I guess it helps in the immediate area for a second,” he said. “But it’s just a patch until you uplift the people.”
A Billion-Dollar Extension
The deployment has also become one of Trump’s most expensive and enduring interventions in the District. The debate over its effectiveness cannot be separated from its staggering cost.
According to an analysis issued by the Congressional Budget Office this year, maintaining the troop posture cost $607 per Guard member daily, reaching over $330 million by early 2026. A more recent estimate submitted to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said that maintaining the Guard’s presence in the city through the end of Trump’s term would cost an additional $1.4 billion. (That amount could cover MPD’s current budget for its 3,100 police officers for two years.)
Janeese Lewis George, the Ward 4 council member and Democratic nominee for D.C. mayor, calls the deployment “nothing more than astronomically expensive political theater” and an “anti-democratic boondoggle that hurts tourism and normalizes the militarization of our cities.”
Jason Ziedenberg, research director at the D.C. Justice Lab, offers another way to measure that spending: He estimates the cost of just a few days of the deployment could fully fund trauma recovery centers for crime survivors in all eight wards of the District. While federal Guard funding could not be simply redirected into the city’s coffers, advocates say the contrast highlights a federal willingness to fund rapid enforcement over long-term community investments.
“Sinking scarce dollars into a failed operation is happening at a time when Americans across the country, but particularly D.C. residents, are facing an affordability crisis,” said Tazra Mitchell, chief policy officer at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.
The deployment’s costs extend beyond the federal price tag. While the National Guard itself does not make arrests, the troops serve as the highly visible manifestation of a broader federal response. Their deployment coincided with aggressive shifts in policing, prosecution and detention that placed growing pressure on the District’s criminal justice system, driving the local jail population up 18% over the past year.
According to D.C. Courts data, criminal filings have nearly tripled since fiscal 2023 — surging from about 7,000 cases to more than 18,000 — even as the court system operated through four years of essentially flat funding. As a result, the courts’ criminal case clearance rate has fallen from 108% in fiscal 2023 to 60% in fiscal 2025.
Misty Thomas Zaleski, executive director of the Council for Court Excellence, cautioned against blaming the Guard itself for the gridlock, pointing instead to the lack of legal infrastructure.
“Public safety doesn’t stop with an arrest,” Zaleski said. “It is more expensive to incarcerate a person than it is to provide them housing, social safety-net services and health care.”
‘Remind People That It’s Not Normal’
A year on, Young of the D.C. Justice Lab says community groups have seen a profound chilling effect driven by a critical oversight gap: Unlike local police, federal troops fall entirely outside the District’s Office of Police Complaints. That lack of local accountability, combined with a fear of federal entanglement, has had tangible human consequences, she said.
Some schools have had to arrange alternative student transportation because parents are too afraid to walk their children past armed patrols, while trauma service providers report that crime victims are skipping healing services to avoid encounters with federal personnel.
Advocates say the questions of accountability and public trust will likely outlast the deployment itself.
“Safety for most people cannot be quantified or measured by the number of armed people in uniform that you see walking around the community,” Young added.
Many D.C. residents and elected officials remain steadfast in their opposition to having the National Guard deployed across the city — and they express it in ways big and small. Convincing Trump to reverse course is unlikely, so Free D.C., the advocacy organization leading protests against the deployment, has launched a postcard-writing campaign to governors providing troops to build political pressure to pull them out.
Gail Sullivan, a Free D.C. adviser and longtime resident of the east end of Capitol Hill, says she regularly uses her neighborhood’s WhatsApp group (somewhat jokingly called the “People’s Front of H Street”) to warn neighbors when troops are walking around. She, though, chooses to directly engage with them.
“Most of the time I’m saying, ‘Who’s looking after your family?’ But now I’m going to change it. I’m going to say, ‘How would you like it that every time your family came out of their house there was an armed National Guardsman walking around?’ That’s a way to look at it from a personal point of view,” she said.
Karen Degraphenreid, an organizer with Free D.C. who also served in the U.S. Air Force for 10 years before leaving earlier this year, says she has found herself conflicted with how she feels about the people who are serving in the National Guard and what they are being told to do in D.C.
“They are not these horrible baby killers, but they are enabling something that is dangerous,” she says. “They aren’t doing the ICE arrests, but if ICE told them to create a perimeter, they would. So at the end of the day, my feelings about how nice they are as people don’t matter as much as, ‘Hey, you’re enabling this occupation.’”
Looking ahead after a year of having the National Guard in D.C., Degraphenreid says she keeps focused on a single message: “We have these conversations to remind people that it’s not normal,” she says. “We’re shouting from the rooftops trying to make sure people don’t get too comfortable.”
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