Three weeks into Donald Trump’s deployment of federal forces into Washington, D.C., the president announced on Truth Social that the capital had become a “CRIME FREE ZONE.” To hear the president tell it, the District—now patrolled by more than 2,200 members of the National Guard and federal law-enforcement officers from roughly 10 government agencies—has gone from hellscape to paradise. “People who haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner,” Trump said days into the surge. Along similar lines, his close adviser Stephen Miller declared that D.C. residents “are wearing their watches again.”

Crime in D.C. does seem to be down. Publicly available numbers provided by the District’s Metropolitan Police Department indicate a decline in crime year-over-y

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