Lawfare Daily: The National Guard in Washington, D.C.

[Intro]

Brad Heath: Part of what I wanted to do was go to the places where there is actually more crime in D.C. and say, you know, "Are there any soldiers here, and do you want them here?" Right? You know, "If they, if they're here to nominally make the city safer, would you like them to be in the parts of the city that are less safe?" And I did not get a lot of enthusiasm in response to that proposition.

Natalie Orpett: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Natalie Orpett, executive editor of Lawfare, with Brad Heath, a reporter at Reuters.

Brad Heath: So the extent to which we still don't really know, like, who tells you where to go every day, who gives you your marching orders, what exactly is the training regimen that you have to have before you come and are on the streets of D.C., and is it different for different units? I would have thought these would be easier questions to answer.

Natalie Orpett: Over a year ago, President Trump sent 800 National Guard members to the streets of Washington, D.C., citing a purported crime emergency. Since then, thousands of armed troops have been deployed to D.C., usually traveling in groups of four or more, seemingly always armed.

Brad has been reporting on the Guard's presence in D.C. and recently published an article titled “Trump Put Thousands of Soldiers on Washington's Streets. They Seldom Stop Crime.” We talked about what he found after reviewing thousands of criminal cases charged in D.C. Superior Court, what he learned from talking to everyone from National Guard members to D.C. officials, and how it all maps onto the legal analysis of whether the Guard is operating lawfully in D.C.

[Main Podcast]

So Brad, you recently published a story in Reuters looking into the National Guard troops that are deployed here in D.C. As Lawfare listeners know we've been covering domestic deployments really closely, including the National Guard, and deployments in D.C. have been a, let us say, particular preoccupation of mine. So I'm delighted to have you and to talk about your really impressive work digging into exactly what has been happening. We have found it very frustrating and concerning from a rule of law perspective how much of a lack of transparency there is in terms of the role of the Guard in D.C.

So before we start talking about exactly what you found, I'm just curious, what drew you to this topic? How does it compare to your normal beat, and, and how did you arrive at it?

Brad Heath: I write about law enforcement a lot, so I'm interested in kind of how the government is using all this power, but this one was a pretty simple one to me, and it, it, I came at it two ways. One is this is kind of President Trump's signature, "I'm gonna get tough on crime," right? You can't get tougher than putting armed soldiers on the street. But also, I work in D.C. I take the Metro. I come up every day, and there's soldiers at the subway stop, and I've just been really curious, like, now that they're here, and we got up to, like, 5,000 this summer, what are they doing?

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. So you went about answering the question of what they're doing through a prism of what they're doing with respect to fighting crime. That was one of the two missions that was bringing the National Guard to D.C. That one is the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful” mission the other one being the “America 250” mission, which was supposed to be for sort of managing crowds and such around the 250th anniversary of, of the United States on July 4th, though that mission was a little bit convoluted, let us say.

But you, you looked in particular at crime, as you say. And you undertook this sort of two-part process that you talk about in the piece. One, looking at a real empirical analysis of court filings, and then a second, doing a lot of just on-the-ground reporting, figuring out what was going on. So I want to start with the first piece. Tell us about this analysis you did with respect to filings in the D.C. Superior Court and why that was an approach that you took.

Brad Heath: So we started with the idea that if the soldiers are here to improve safety, to deal with crime, one of the places we should expect to see them is, like, rubbing up against law enforcement. You know, they're participating in some way in making the city safer or detaining people, stopping crime, whatever it might be.

And those tend to get memorialized in this, the local city court, which is where almost all other criminal accusations in, in the District of Columbia go. So we obtained what are known as Gerstein affidavits. They're like the initial charging document for every publicly available superior court case in the year since the National Guard were first deployed, which is 17,000 and change charging documents, and, and went through those to just see like, is there National Guard here? And if so, like what, what are they doing? What, what's their role? You know, did they detain someone? Did they witness something? You know, in a surprising number of cases, they were the crime victims.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, and as you found also, there were a couple where they had perhaps committed crimes.

Brad Heath: There, there were two where soldiers were charged with crimes for off-duty weapons possession. Both of those got pretty quickly dismissed by the U.S. Attorney's office.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, so before we talk about what you found in there, did, did you look at all at whether these cases, these charges ended up resulting in convictions, or was that sort of separate from your analysis?

Brad Heath: We didn't look through the final dispositions on m- in, in any systematic way, and a lot of them had not been fully resolved. I mean, y- you know, some number of these are pretty recent. It just takes months to get through the court process, and, and some number of these end up with kinda, kinda mental health issue that makes even a 2025 case take a bit longer. But if somebody's coming up and like threatening a National Guard soldier or, or some of the stuff they're, they're seeing on the street downtown, like it is, it is not a quickly disposed of case.

Natalie Orpett: Right. Okay, so tell us about the numbers here. What did you find in terms of looking at all of these Gerstein affidavits, all of these cases, and to what extent did the National Guard show up in one of those capacities?

Brad Heath: The National Guard made an appearance in one form or another in 1.3% of the criminal matters that were handled in D.C. in the year since they arrived. So that's 217 cases out of, I think, about 17,000 that we were counting at the time.

And about half of those are the Guard acting in a way that you might think, you know, soldiers are doing law enforcement, right? They, they've stopped somebody. You know, they, they saw a shoplifter and chased him down. And actually, oddly enough, last summer I was sitting in the basement in superior court and ended up on a bench next to the very first guy arrested by National Guard soldiers who I think had beaten up a park police officer and then run away, and it was some soldiers very early in the deployment who, who tackled him. So, so that flavor of stuff. That, that's about half of what we found in the court records.

Natalie Orpett: So the overall number is obviously quite small. Did that surprise you as an initial finding?

Brad Heath: Yeah. I mean, well, yes and no, right? Because part of what animated this is when I go to work and come home from work, I see the soldiers, but I don't, I've never actually seen them do anything. But the sheer numbers in this deployment, you know, around the summertime, we got up north of 4,600 troops, like close to 5,000. So these soldiers outnumber the sworn officers on D.C.'s police department, like considerably, and they cost more than D.C.'s police department considerably on a daily basis.

And, and you know, they're, they're here in a city that's, if, if you just take the, the metropolitan police staffing, the local police force for D.C., it is the most policed big city in the United States by far. And that's before you add in all the other weird things, you know, the, the Capitol Police, the Zoo Police, the Park Police, the Secret Service that make D.C. like the, it, you never go around downtown and feel like, "Wow, there are no cops here," you know? So yes, like they, just the sheer numbers, I would think at some point they must do something.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. It's, it's interesting. It, we'll talk about this more throughout, but depending on the angle you're coming to this question from, there's a way to think of that as a positive thing because at Lawfare, for example, we've been asking a lot of questions about whether it is even legally permissible for the National Guard to be conducting law enforcement activities like crime fighting. And so from that angle, a small percentage of cases having any involvement by the National Guard is arguably a positive thing.

On the other hand, as you say, from a why are there 5,000 armed military personnel roaming the streets and standing on the corner and scaring little kids and all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons if they're not doing anything when they are supposed to be here according to the mission authority and the declaration of crime emergency that the president invoked in order to bring them here, the numbers aren't actually showing that. So it is an interesting sort of dynamic.

Brad Heath: I think there's some view in the District too that having the National Guard standing around the Mall near the White House at metro stations and not really doing anything is a pretty important victory, right? That, that there, there's some number of people in D.C. and in D.C. government who don't want the Guard to be doing more than they are because that creates opportunities for things to go kind of haywire.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, talk more about that. Who, who is of that opinion, and what do you think about it?

Brad Heath: You know, it, it, I've certainly heard in reporting this, in talking to people in the community that, you know, yes, we are not seeing soldiers, for example, east of the river on the other side of the Anacostia from the Mall, where crime is a bigger problem and you don't see as many soldiers. And a lot of people there don't really wanna see as many soldiers.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so let's shift to these three categories that you used in your piece to sort of explain the type of involvement of National Guard that you found in the Superior Court filings and these affidavits that you mentioned.

So the first was instances where the Guard stopped the suspects themselves without the involvement of D.C. police, which is much more looking like an arrest. Legally, there's a sort of complicated line between detention and arrest, which we've talked about in other contexts. But tell us about that one first. So what did that look like? Any cases in particular stand out to you in that category?

Brad Heath: If you look at the type of thing where the National Guard is actually out detaining people on the street, it is like when I was a young reporter, I would have to go read the police blotters every day, and they, you know, the police just go to all these really petty, trivial crimes, and that's a lot of what the National Guard has been involved in downtown, right? They, they have stopped people who have jumped the gates on the subway. They have occasionally gone after shoplifters, right? So they, there was one fairly recently where a guy stole two Slim Jims, like the, the beef jerky sticks from a CVS. They're worth about seven dollars, and, and soldiers stopped him. There was a woman who, she was in a 7-Eleven and drank a 20 oz A&W Root Beer and, you know, I, I forget if it was four or six soldiers detained her. She didn't pay for it. So they, a lot of these are, like, not very serious crimes. They have also broken up some fights. There's some assaults that they've sort of put themselves in the middle of, but, but for the most part, it, it's petty stuff.

And then there, there's a second bucket there, too, where, you know, they, they are largely deployed around the subway, so the subway has its own police force. They might be stopping someone, and the National Guard will help. They might be, you know, yelling, "Stop that guy," and the National Guard will, like, be at the other end of the platform and stop that guy.

Natalie Orpett: Got it. And then, if I recall correctly, your third category was instances in which the National Guard were witnesses to a crime, and that's how they show up in the affidavits. Tell us about that category.

Brad Heath: There, there's a variety of cases where, you know, you put enough people on the street, eventually they're gonna see something. So they, they have seen everything from a homicide down by the, the wharf and all the way to, you know, someone chalking on a, a statue or a flagpole outside the train station.

One of the people was wearing a banana costume, right? They, they witnessed this. They were, they, they told the police what they saw. They did not actually stop the banana costume to chalking. So there, there's I think 30 odd cases like that where, where in one way or another, or another, they provided information to the police but didn't actually like lay hands on somebody.

Natalie Orpett: Gotcha.

Brad Heath: And that's the sort of thing you or I might do on the street too, right? If you read charging documents, they are, they are full of statements from witnesses of store managers and passersby and all this stuff.

Natalie Orpett: Right. I know, as you rightly pointed out, a lot of these cases haven't had a chance to actually make their way through proceedings yet. But out of curiosity, do you know if in any of those cases National Guard ended up being witnesses in actual trials?

Brad Heath: I had heard that some were going to be, I, I talked to lawyers who were keen on bringing them back to testify in a couple trials, but you know, most D.C., especially petty cases, don't go to trial. They, they are resolved with the police. So the ones that I have seen resolved have mostly been pleaded out in the way they normally are.

Natalie Orpett: And I'm just curious, as you're working through these numbers and it's, you know, a much smaller universe of cases than one might expect, although as you say on the other hand, maybe it's very predictable. But how did you arrive at these three different buckets and, and how did you think about organizing that way?

Brad Heath: I mean, the nice thing, sometimes I deal with like millions and millions of records, so it's actually kind of refreshing to deal with 217 where I can just literally read every word of everything. And, and it just kind of became clear, you know. So we started with three, with, with more than three, but they kinda collapsed, right? So there's the National Guard actually detaining some- like single-handedly apprehending someone. Then there's assisting, witnessing. There's another category where they don't really appear to have done anything.

You know, the, the, the example we led the piece with was a, a fairly nasty sounding assault outside a, a nightclub not far from downtown, where three cops roll up and find a, a man stomping on a young lady on the curb outside the club. And so they charge him, and that, that case is still going on. But at the end of his report, you know, he makes a point of noting that there were 15 National Guard members on patrol in the area who didn't do anything at all.

Natalie Orpett: It's remarkable. Sort of undercuts the deterrence claim.

Brad Heath: The other bucket is where, where the soldiers are themselves victims, right? Which was, that bucket was bigger than I thought. You know, there, there was last year really horrible shooting very close to the White House where, where two soldiers from West Virginia were shot, one of them fatally. You know, but, but there's so much everyday kind of victimization where the National Guard soldiers who are in D.C. have been, you know, spit on. I think we counted nine spittings, pushed.

Natalie Orpett: And those are actually charged?

Brad Heath: Yeah, those are charged. And they tend to be charged as a, an assault on a police officer because my understanding now is if not all of the soldiers on the street, at least a large number of them are deputized as U.S. Marshals. So, so to spit on them is to spit on a police officer, which is a more serious charge than spitting on you or me. So, yeah.

And then there are those people who make threats. Somebody threatened to shoot them with a bazooka, which I don't believe he had a bazooka, but that, that was the charge. There was one this actually happened after the piece published, but I saw it a couple of days ago, where someone was just walking around one of the metro stations filming them, and was arrested after being asked to leave and not doing that.

Natalie Orpett: Interesting. So since your, your typical beat is doing a lot of crime reporting, I'm, I'm curious of your sense of whether those charges were similar to what you would have seen against regular MPD or whether you're seeing more charges or sort of differently natured charges because National Guard were the victims rather than MPD officers.

Brad Heath: I don't really know the answer to that. I suspect that if you spit on an MPD officer, you are gonna get charged for that. I suspect that if you I actually don't know what would happen if you told an MPD officer that you're gonna shoot them with a bazooka while not possessing a bazooka. I, I probably wouldn't recommend it, right? I don't know. You know, the, the police tend to take assaults and threats against the police pretty seriously, no matter who's doing it or, or when. But some of these are also, like, so, you know, when you, when you write about crime for a national publication, you're not usually writing about a simple assault misdemeanor.

Natalie Orpett: Right. Okay, I have a question that I think I know the answer to, but I'm going to ask it anyway, and I will give folks the context that this is one of those things that when you're obsessing over the legal intricacies of whether all of this is even permissible, you care about things like what is the status under which these National Guard are operating? Is it Title 10? Is it Title 32? Is it state active duty, and where are they from? Because all of these are factors that influence the legal analysis of whether law enforcement activities are okay. So my question for you, after having reviewed these affidavits and learning about some of these cases, is, is there ever anywhere any indication of these sorts of facts about the National Guardsmen themselves?

Brad Heath: No, I, I don't think that ever shows up at all in any of the charging documents. May- maybe it gets fleshed out a little further in litigation, but, but in a lot of these cases, it wouldn't really matter. You know, the, the actual arrest is made by an MPD officer. You wouldn't normally have a lot of standing to challenge your prosecution because, like, I tackled you and waited for the police. Like, maybe you could go after me, I guess. But no, they, they never really spell that out.

They, we do get periodic updates from the National Guard now, like once a week, about how many soldiers are here and where they're from, and they're, they're 20-odd states. It's been really interesting to me, and I don't have a good explanation for this. A couple states have, like, one person, which seems like a, a very small deployment. They are principally, but not exclusively states with Republican governors. Now, I think we're down to 3,600, so it seems like the, the summer deployment is winding down some.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, I mean, I, I asked that somewhat in jest because I would've been shocked if that had been spelled out in the filings you were looking at, but-

Brad Heath: Yeah, can it, I mean, you know, if they witness something, it doesn't really matter, right? And if it's, I suppose if they help the, you know, if, if, if I'm on the subway platform, right? And the, the transit policeman is yelling like, "Stop that guy. Stop that guy," you know, "He stole her purse," and I stop him I don't have any authority in D.C. I don't think that would matter to the prosecu- so I, I don't, I don't know how much it would matter. Maybe it would matter the most in, like, the, the, the pizza stealing case where, like, they, they detained the person, but they, they basically, like, sit him down until MPD shows up.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. I mean, the, the questio- the analysis from any individual case is gonna be pretty fact-specific. But one of the things that we've really been finding as we're looking at this legal question is just that transparency is a major problem. There've been sort of conflicting explanations of exactly what the mission is that people are operating under and what the extent of their claimed authorities are, and this is all in court right now, still pending. So, you know, it, it would have been convenient, but as I say, quite surprising if any of this information showed up as facts that would be deployed in the litigation to talk about sort of the overarching lawfulness of, of the deployments and the missions.

Brad Heath: I mean, that, that's an interesting, may- maybe it'll come out in discovery in something, right? Because, you know, they, they do turn over even in these petty cases, like, dozens of hours of body cam video and loads of paper. So it, there could be something floating around. I don't know.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, I mean, I, I mentioned in another podcast that we did actually that if, if I were a defense lawyer and my client had been detained or arrested by a member of the National Guard, I would have motions relating to unlawful arrest because the, the scope of the National Guard authority to arrest versus detain is somewhat contested, and it will depend all, on all of these factors. And it's, it would be a quite fact-specific analysis, but it will be interesting to see if any of that comes out in discovery and how that might inform these broader threshold questions of legality of the broader deployments and the nature of the mission.

Brad Heath: For sure. I'll, I'll be interested in the answer you find to that.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. Okay, I want to shift over to the reporting you did because this analysis of the filings was really, really interesting. But I have to say, after my own experience trying to occasionally chat with the National Guard who are patrolling my neighborhood and the area around our offices at Lawfare, they do not seem particularly forthcoming with information.

And there's, there have been a lot of reporters who have had a really hard time just nailing down the facts of who people are, what they're doing, what their understanding is of what they're doing. And so, I'm curious, just as an initial matter, what was the process like of reporting? How did, how did you go about talking to people?

Brad Heath: I, so this was sort of multifaceted, right? Like, part of this was to talk to people in the community and just see, like, what do you think of these soldiers being here? Are they having an impact? I mean, part of what I wanted to do was go to the places where there is actually more crime in D.C. and say, you know, "Are there any soldiers here and do you want them here?" Right? You know, if they, if they're here to nominally make the city safer, would you like them to be in the parts of the city that are less safe? And I did not get a lot of enthusiasm in response to that proposition.

And part of the reporting was to talk to people in government and to talk to the soldiers themselves to see, you know, what are you doing? And, and I have to say, like, the soldiers are not allowed to talk to the press. We did ask for interviews and were denied, but I spent a considerable number of hours out in the heat just kind of chatting with people. They're not hard to find. A lot of them were very receptive to having a conversation. They tell you where they're from. Very pleasant for the most part. You know, one soldier was, I mean, he seemed thrilled to have been handing out water to tourists who had overheated. He was giving people directions. Like, he just seemed to, like, really like what he was doing. And I didn't like wearing a short-sleeve shirt in that weather, and he was wearing body armor. So, I mean, good for him.

I talked to other soldiers who were less enthusiastic, who didn't exactly know when they were gonna be going home, but, you know, any day would have been fine, a- and kind of everything in between. And then also ended up talking a fair amount to, to lawyers and people involved in criminal cases just about, like, what's it like to have soldiers show up in the middle of all this? And, and, and that was pretty interesting, too.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, I, to go back to the first set of folks that you mentioned, what did people say about why they did or didn't like having the National Guard around for purported crime-fighting purposes?

Brad Heath: I heard a lot of complaints that soldiers have kind of harassed people. You know, some of the, some of the stuff is if you go down to, like, the Navy Yard area, the D.C. does have a teen curfew. The soldiers have been involved in, in policing that somewhat, like, basically not letting teens get on the subway after hours. So, so there's that kind of stuff. But there, there's also, like, the, this sense of this isn't really the right way, this isn't what the community needs to deal with crime. Like, the community needs community policing. It needs people we know. It needs people we trust. It needs people to solve crimes. It does not need, you know, a, a kind of quickly turning over cast of, of armed soldiers walking around. So I, you know, even in the places in the city where I went, where, where crime has been, like, a real issue for years, if not decades, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for, "Gosh, I wish these guys would get off the Mall and come over here."

Natalie Orpett: That's interesting. And in terms of your conversations with National Guard members themselves, interesting that you, you heard a range of liking what, you know, one, one guy liking what he was doing, others not so much. Did you have any sense of, or did you have an opportunity to discuss at all why they were there or their understanding of what their mission was, the parameters of what they're doing, not doing, that sort of thing?

Brad Heath: Only enough to kinda confirm the understanding we had from, from other sources. You know, I, for, for the most part, I guess this is probably good, soldiers were, were pretty rule-following, right? The, the rule is don't talk to reporters, I'm a reporter. There you go. But, but they, wnough people were chatty enough that if we, if we had learned something from, from other sources, they could kinda, they weren't there to keep secrets.

Natalie Orpett: I see. And did you ever have a situation where, I mean, sometimes it's visible on folks’ uniform if they were there for the America 250 mission versus the D.C. Safe and Beautiful mission. Did you notice any distinction between those mission folks or, or did that not really come up?

Brad Heath: That didn't really co- I, I mean, I did, I definitely didn't notice it. But I was doing this a lot in the sort of height of the, the 250 stuff. So I, I'm not sure what the balance of people I encountered was anyway.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, I think it's an interesting, I, I ask only because it seems to me in a number of contexts, there's been sort of a conflation of the mission, of those two missions. America 250 being really crowd control and D.C. Safe and Beautiful being more, at least possibly, crime-related law enforcement activities. And this came up because Governor Whitmer actually had, I believe, called back her National Guard deployment that was supposed to be there only for America 250 to help with crowds, and she had the sense that they were being used for broader purposes than that, sort of conflating the America 250 mission with the D.C. Safe and Beautiful mission. And this again goes to the, the question of sort of transparency and rule of law, whether we have a good sense of who's doing what and under what authorities and scope of mission.

Brad Heath: Yeah, I, that's, that's a good question. And, you know, the, that, like, crowd control America 250 kind of deployment, that's not a particularly unusual one, right? Like, there are National Guard soldiers in D.C. every Fourth of July for the fireworks because somebody has, you know, they close this ridiculous number of roads, and somebody has to man all of those barricades.

Natalie Orpett: The last group, I'm curious if you can say more about the last group of people you mentioned talking to for the reporting, which was people in government. And I'm just wondering among people, you know, if you talked to anyone who was in the Metropolitan Police Department or D.C. local government, you know, how, how they felt about this enormous influx of National Guard and facts like how much more it was costing and how that, you know, could that money have instead gone to pay for additional police officers in D.C. who would be sort of permanent fixtures here with more direct command and control by civilian authorities in D.C. and, and things like that. What, what came up in those conversations?

Brad Heath: Sure. I'll start by saying, like, conversations with D.C., D.C. government generally does not wanna talk about this particularly much. And it was difficult to get people in D.C. government to talk about it at all because they, this is such a complicated relationship for D.C., right? Like, they are, they are under all this federal authority. They have to live with it, and they also have to manage that relationship, like, not from a position of power all the time.

So, you know, but, but the mayor has said a couple times, like, the, that this is not how we should be doing public safety in D.C., right? That, that she, she was fine with having additional federal agents here, right? One of the things the administration did was send hundreds of additional federal agents who basically behaved as local cops especially in the early days of the, the 2025 anti-crime surge. But, like, ICE, she did not want here, and the National Guard she did not want here.

Natalie Orpett: And this was, this is Mayor Bowser you're talking about?

Brad Heath: Yeah. Yeah. But the, the number of people in D.C. government who, like, declined to talk about this at all was, was surprising to me.

Natalie Orpett: That's interesting ‘cause I imagine in, in your other reporting over the years, you've had a lot of instances where D.C. has to navigate this very tricky relationship with the federal government and the limitations on home rule and all of that. So did you, did you find that they were even more reluctant to speak than in other situations like that?

Brad Heath: I, I don't cover D.C. government a lot, but I have found them to be more helpful over the years in terms of providing information and, and just talking about stuff than they were with the, with the National Guard.

Natalie Orpett: Interesting. What about others in, maybe not directly in government, but employees of D.C., for example? Or individual police officers or things like that. Did you get a chance to talk to anyone who's sort of working alongside the National Guard?

Brad Heath: Not as much as I would like to. And, and, and MPD is not really working alongside the National Guard. They're just kind of coming when called. Or one of the, one of the really interesting and still kind of open questions is the extent to which there's coordination between the police and the National Guard. You know, the, the police work hand in glove with the, you know, federal law enforcement who's been surged into D.C. Like, that's the kind of thing they've been doing day in, day out for decades.

With the Guard, it's a lot less clear. I mean, it's less clear even, you know, does D.C. get a say in, "It'd be really helpful if you went out onto this street corner today," or, "It'd be really helpful if you stayed away from here." My sense, it, they've answered a couple of this question, like, in vague terms in a couple community meetings, is that there's not… They don't really have much control over where the soldiers go or what the soldiers do.

Natalie Orpett: And did you get any gauge on how people are feeling about that or if they wish it were otherwise?

Brad Heath: Not really. I mean, I'm sure it wouldn't surprise anyone, I think, if D.C. had more, would be happy to have more control over what's going on within its borders, you know. But I, but I don't really know the answer to that.

Natalie Orpett: And in talking with members of the National Guard themselves, did any of them talk about the relationship with D.C. authorities?

Brad Heath: No, not really. You know, they, they do call in. We, we see that sometimes. They, they have some communication channels that get them in touch with MPD, I think maybe faster than calling. I don't know if they have a radio connection or something else. Sometimes they do just call 9-1-1. But no, they, they didn't really give us any information about that.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. A lot of opacity still.

Brad Heath: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for, for such a big and highly visible thing, there's a lot we don't know about the just kind of mechanics of how it works every day.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. How do you, how do you think about that? Because, you know, I'm coming to it from a, a little bit in the weeds legal question that is really quite separate from the experience of people living in the district, even myself. There's sort of the academic question and, and how it will manifest in legal challenges in the courts, but there's, there's also really what I think you are focusing on more, which is what the experience is and whether the deployment of the Guard is, is living up to the promise that it would fight crime. I mean, how are you thinking about all of this?

Brad Heath: I thought at the outset this would be a somewhat easier puzzle to crack because, you know, D.C. is a, a relatively transparent local government, and there are 5,000, there were 5,000 soldiers in D.C., like, somebody's gonna know what's going on. So the extent to which we still don't really know, like, who tells you where to go every day, who gives you your marching orders, what exactly is the training regimen that you have to have before you come and are on the streets of D.C., and is it different for different units?

You know, early on, we saw a lot of military police units here, actually. Now, not so mu- It seems to be more of a, a mixed bag that we don't know even all the units that are here. So, I would've thought these would be easier questions to answer.

Natalie Orpett: What exactly is getting in the way of answering it? Is it just because people will not talk in a forthright manner, or are there other routes that you tried to, to sort all this out?

Brad Heath: A little of everything, really. Like, you know, there were a lot of questions that people didn't wanna answer. There were a lot of people, you know, the National Guard didn't really talk to us or answer questions. You know, the, the D.C. government declined to comment when we, when we asked them for interviews. So there's just a lot of, a lot of stuff that remains unanswered.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. It's, it's really consistent with, with what we've found as well, just the difficulty in nailing down basic facts is, is kind of staggering. I wanna talk about a couple of other things that, that really stood out to me in your piece. And I guess as a big picture matter, you talk a bit about the question of whether this actually reduced crime, and there is the whole theory of deterrence. We've touched on this a little bit, but undercut a bit by the, the fact that most Guard are deployed in wealthier, less crime-ridden areas of the city. But you do note in the piece that crime has gone down in D.C.  Tell me about how you're, how you thought about that dynamic and, and just how you measured the question in your reporting about whether this has an impact on crime.

Brad Heath: Yeah. I, deterrence is one of those things that's really, really tricky to prove empirically, and we didn't really set out to, to prove or disprove it, but in part because there's so many moving pieces here, right? You know, even if you think about the District of Columbia and what the Trump administration is doing here, it's not just 5,000 soldiers on the street. It's hundreds of additional federal agents. It's the U.S. attorney changing their charging practices. Immediately when that happened, there was a pretty notable decrease in public mobility, right? Like, fewer people were taking the, the bike shares and taxis, and there were just less, fewer people on the street making restaurant reservations.

Unpacking all of that is really complicated, but there are a couple things that, that stood out as pretty noteworthy. One is like, yes, crime is down in D.C. in 2026 and in 2025. That was also the case in 2024. You know, the, the murder numbers have been going down a lot. A lot of the other violent crime numbers have been going down a lot. But murder especially, you know, if you look nationally, we are reaching modern lows for homicides in ways that kind of defy easy explanation, right?

So Baltimore, which has not had a sur- a federal surge, and in some sense has had, like, federal resources withdrawn from the city to bring them to D.C., is also experiencing kind of record low homicides and a huge decrease in crime. So how do you, how do you unpack all of that?

And then in addition to that, there's just the, the physical geography of the deployment, right? So we don't know conclusively where all the soldiers in D.C. are. But one of the ways we went about it is to, to look at all of the locations of the, of the incidents that they were involved in that ended up in court. Because sooner or later, if you're spending enough time out trying to deal with crime it stands to reason you will rub up against the legal system, like, at least once.

And, so we, we looked at the census tracts where we could find some evidence that the National Guard was doing something, and those tracts were generally wealthier parts of D.C. They were whiter parts of D.C. They were parts of D.C. that were safer, you know, even before the administration started really focusing on D.C. crime in 2025. And, and in particular, like, those census tracts tracts where, where, where the census tracts where they were not is where 82% of the D.C. murders happen, right? So, a- a- and yet murder's going, crime is going down in the neighborhoods where, where the Guard isn't. So I, I think the deterrence piece is just really tricky.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, and it sounds like based on the cases that you looked at in Superior Court, the vast majority of those in which the National Guard was involved were, were nonviolent crimes. Is that right?

Brad Heath: Yeah, I, I would say we, we didn't count every offense, in part because the, it gets a little tricky in Superior Court. People get charged with other things. You might have another warrant, too. But there was a lot of nonviolent, kind of petty property crime that they were involved in.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. And I just wanted to clarify one thing you said.

Brad Heath: Yeah.

Natalie Orpett: So overall aggregate crime numbers are going down both in D.C. and nationally, and the larger percentage of crimes that occurred in D.C. in areas where the National Guard was not deployed, for the most part, that is not a reflection numerically of the majority of the decline happening where the Guard was versus because the Guard wasn't in these other areas, crime did not decrease.

Brad Heath: No.

Natalie Orpett: Is that right?

Brad Heath: Yeah, that, that's right. The, the, you know, the Guard is, is not in the parts of the city or not spending much time in the parts of the city where a lot of the, the really serious, especially violent crime problems have happened. And, and those parts of the city are seeing real reductions in violent crime comparable to what you see in the neighborhoods where, where the National Guard is. You know, there, there's not, there's not some clear pattern where, you know, if the Guard is there, crime, crime seems to be down more at least based on the location data that, that we had available to us.

The other thing worth saying, though, is that if you look at just, like, the total number of violent crimes reported to metropolitan police, it's actually higher this year than it was last year. So there, there has been th- this very small couple percentage point increase in total violent crimes in D.C. That's mostly serious assaults. You know, homicide numbers have gone down, so that, that too is sort of a, a, a complicating factor.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, and is it possible even to disaggregate location of those and map it onto where the National Guard is deployed or not?

Brad Heath: The short answer to that is yes. Like, D.C., D.C. does publish daily its crime data, and you can look at it by neighborhood. And, and we did, you know, we tried to look for neighborhood patterns and, and really didn't see anything strong. But, but there's so many, you know, you can't do off that a, a really rigorous study because there are so many other confounding factors. You know, think about like Park Police used to just be by the Mall, and now they're patrolling all over D.C. and, and engaging in, you know, vehicle pursuits. And they are east of the river. They, you know, the, you know, the feds are in places where, where there's been a lot of crime, and they're, they're doing gun enforcement, and they're doing some drug enforcement. So all that stuff just gets just very complicated to measure.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm really grateful for the analysis you guys were able to put together to map this out because it strikes me as a really impossible task to even try to tie these things together. And of course, it's important to, to ask for the receipts because this is the whole premise and the whole reason that the, the troops are supposed to be deployed here.

Brad Heath: Well, and then you throw the other, there's another layer that you heap on top of that, which are, are the D.C. crime data any good anyway? You know, the, the, the Trump administration has raised complaints, but the, the D.C. inspector general too has found, like, shortcomings in how Metropolitan Police handles its crime reporting, and they ousted a bunch of commanders and, and, you know, there was a, a- another investigation that found they were under some pressure to try to reduce the serious crime numbers in, in places that have been the targets of local policing initiatives. So, like, are our data any good? It's tricky to know. I mean, the White House uses them, the district uses them, the FBI uses them, so they're, they're what you got.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. A lot of layers of complexity.

Brad Heath: Yeah. It's a, it is a complex layer cake. For what seemed like a simple story to start out of like, hey, what are these guys doing?

Natalie Orpett: Well, you, you got a lot further in sorting that out than I've seen anywhere else. I wanted to ask you one other question, which was, in your piece you quoted General Randy Manor, who was the second in command of the National Guard Bureau.

Brad Heath: Yeah.

Natalie Orpett: And he said something about how soldiers are ill-prepared for police work. Can you talk a little bit about what that meant, what your observations were with respect to that concept?

Brad Heath: Yeah. His, he made two points when we were talking about the, the, you know, soldiers and police work. One was they just don't have the training that police officers do, right? Police officers spend time in the community. You know, they go through the academy. They have a training officer. There, there's a lot that goes into putting a police officer on the street, even as a, as a rookie. National Guard soldier, not as much. You know, they, they do have training, but it's more combat training. It, it's not, you know, "Go stop shoplifters, go stop fare jumpers." You know, policing is a very difficult job. Day in, day out, police officers are dealing with fellow citizens experiencing, like, the very worst day of their lives. You know, their, their worst behavior, someone else's worst behavior. It is not easy.

The other point was the National Guard, w- when you think about them, you might often think of the National Guard responding to a disaster. You know, they, and, and when your house is flooded, when your neighborhood is on fire, and the National Guard shows up, they are unequivocally there to help you. And his point was, now you have the National Guard on the streets of a U.S. city kind of keeping an eye on you. Now, you know, they, they might be protecting you from crime, but they might also be checking you out to make sure you are not committing any crime. And that, that's a different thing and, and will change how people look at the National Guard in their communities. You know, and, and I think he found that, that idea troubling as well.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. And did you hear any echoes of that among the National Guard who were willing to talk with you?

Brad Heath: No, not really. You know, I, to the extent people were talking to me, they, they seemed, like, happy to be there to help and, and thinking they were helping.

Natalie Orpett: Interesting. Okay, I wanna wrap up just by asking you, you know, what do you wish that you knew that you weren't able to find out? What are the sort of burning questions that remain in your mind?

Brad Heath: Oh, gosh, I have a long list. Like, like at the end of every story. Well, let me back up for a second and talk about policing, ‘cause there's one, there's one part of this that I find really interesting a-and it goes to the cost of this, right? So there, there is the multi- you know, multi-billion dollar cost. The administration most recently said they, you know, they need close to 1.5 billion dollars to keep soldiers in D.C. through the end of President Trump's second term.

But one of the more interesting charging documents I read was from last year, and the National Guard was at the Capitol South Metro Station, so it, one of the stations closest to the, the Capitol office complex, and someone was stealing hats on the train. He stole a hat from someone, who then tussled with him. When the ca- train came in, the National Guard got on, started to break up the tussle, and the, the guy was charged with assaulting the soldier and reaching for his weapon. You know, we, we've never seen a, in any of these charging documents, a weapon come out. This is as close as we've got.

What was really interesting to me about that document was they, they told us who the soldier was, and he was in a military police unit. He turns out to be a, a, a decorated police officer from Jackson, Mississippi, and you know, Jackson, Mississippi, for years had a homicide problem that was so much worse, like per capita, than D.C.'s. They've had a very hard time with that. And also, they have a few a lot fewer cops than D.C., so s- one of the costs to the deployment was they had to take a, a, you know, an officer out of a, a quite dangerous U.S. city to have them guard the subway.

Those kind of costs are, are much harder to measure. I'd be really interested in, in seeing that, like more granularity in, in who's been here and what are they doing. I remember a colleague, when the president was talking about deploying the National Guard, went down to Louisiana and was talking to a police chief there, who said, "You know, I could really, I wouldn't mind having some National Guard on my street, but then again, if you call up the National Guard, that's gonna be a bunch of my officers because they also are National Guard, you know, soldiers in a military police unit, so I, th- there's a bit of a double-edged sword here." I thought that was a really interesting observation.

But you asked about things I, things I'd like to find out, and like I, I would really like to find out like what the level of coordination is. One of the, one of the things we've heard is putting the National Guard on the streets frees up metropolitan police officers to go do other things. I'm not sure that's true. You know, we, we don't really have evidence that that's true. You, it's not like they've left downtown. So to what extent are they, are they even coordinating at that level? I, I'm really interested in like what are the soldiers doing that doesn't come up against the law enforcement, so as you know, just what's a, what's a day like? You know, we, we, we go see glimpses for a minute or two and then they move on. But like, what do, what is today like?

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of still unanswered questions.

Brad Heath: I, it's, it's surprising. I mean, for, for like so many people in a town full of curious journalists, right? Like, surely we should have nailed this by now.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, and, and to say nothing of the question of whether it should be okay as a rule of law matter for us to not be able to get these answers.

Brad Heath: Well, you know, that's what FOIA's for and, you know, come, I don't know, 2035 or something like that we'll have lots of partially satisfactory answers.

Natalie Orpett: That seems like a long time to wait.

Brad Heath: So- some places do a very good job, but I, you know, the, to the extent these deal with the Marshal service, right? I, I got an email from them this morning asking if I still wanted the thing I asked for in 2024 or ‘23. You know, it's, it takes a while.

Natalie Orpett: It's not an easy beat you've chosen.

Brad Heath: No, but it's really interesting.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah. Okay. Well, I think that's a great place to leave it. I, I wanna really thank you for this work because I think you were able to really dive into a lot more factually than I've seen anywhere else, and it seems like it took a tremendous amount of work and dedication.

Brad Heath: Well, I appreciate that. That's, that's very nice of you to say. It was fun to do.

Natalie Orpett: That's great. Thank you for that and thank you for joining us.

Brad Heath: Oh, my pleasure.

[Outro]

Natalie Orpett: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad-free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter at lawfaremedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help.

And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja with audio engineering by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thank you for listening