President Donald Trump declared that he will deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington, DC, and that he is taking control of its police department to fight crime.

At a press conference, Trump proclaimed a “Liberation Day” for the city and promised to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, chaos, squalor, and worse.”

However, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser claimed that the city has “experienced a huge drop in crime” and was “at a 30-year low for violent crime.”

BBC Verify examines what the figures on violent crime in the capital show and how it compares to other US cities.

Has violent crime increased in Washington, DC?

Trump's executive order declaring “a criminal emergency in the District of Columbia” mentions “the increase in violence in the capital.” In his press conference, he repeatedly referred to crime as being “out of control.”

But according to crime numbers released by the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department (MPDC), violent crime fell after peaking in 2023 and hit a 30-year low in 2024.

And according to preliminary data for 2025, it’s still falling.

Overall violent crime is down 26% this year compared to the same point in 2024, and robberies are down 28%, according to the MPDC.

Trump and the D.C. police union questioned the veracity of the numbers. city police department crime.

The MPDC and the FBI, another major source of U.S. crime statistics, report violent crime differently.

The MPDC's public data showed a 35% drop by 2024, while the FBI data showed a 9% decline.

So the numbers agree that crime is declining in DC, but they differ on the level of that decline.

The downward trend is “unequivocal and broad,” according to Adam Gelb, CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a justice think tank.

“The numbers vary depending on the time period and types of crimes being examined,” Gelb says.

“But overall, there is an unequivocal and large decline in violence since the summer of 2023, when there were spikes in homicides, assaults with a firearm, robberies, and car thefts.”

And the murder rates?

Trump also claimed that “murders in 2023 reached the rate higher than there likely has been” in Washington, D.C., adding that the numbers “only go back 25 years.”

When we asked the White House for the source of the numbers, they said they were “numbers provided by the FBI.”

The homicide rate did spike in 2023 to around 40 per 100,000 people, the highest in 20 years, according to FBI data.

However, this number is not the highest ever recorded: it was significantly higher in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The homicide rate declined in 2024 and this year is down 12% compared to the same point last year, according to the MPDC.

Studies suggest the capital's homicide rate is higher than average when compared to other large US cities.

As of August 11, there had been 99 homicides so far this year in Washington DC, including the shooting death of a 21-year-old congressional intern, a case Trump referenced in his press conference.

And carjackings?

The president also mentioned the case of a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee years old who was injured in an alleged attempted carjacking in the capital in early August.

Trump claimed that “the number of carjackings has more than tripled” in the past five years.

So far this year, the MPDC has recorded 189 vehicle theft offenses, up from 300 in the same period last year.

According to the CCJ, carjackings increased markedly from 2020 onwards and reached a monthly peak of 140 reported incidents in June 2023.

From July 2025, a citywide curfew is in place for those under 17 from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.

The measure was introduced to combat juvenile delinquency, including car theft, which often spikes during the summer months.

How does crime compare to other parts of the US?

“The level of violence in the District remains largely higher than the average for the three dozen cities in our sample,” the CCJ expert told the BBC.

“Although its downward trend is consistent with what we are seeing in other major cities across the country,” he added.

The CCJ studies crime rates in 30 major US cities.

Its analysis suggests that the homicide rate in DC fell by 19% in the first half of this year (January-June 2025), compared to the same period last year.

This is a drop slightly higher than the average 17% drop recorded across the cities in the CCJ study sample.

However, if we take the first six months of 2025 and compare them with the same period in 2019 - before the Covid-19 pandemic -, we see only a 3% drop in homicides.

Across the 30 cities in the study, that drop was 14% over the same period.

This article was written and edited by our journalists with the help of an artificial intelligence translation tool, as part of a pilot program.