MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The 30-day national emergency that President Trump declared allowing him to take control of police in Washington, D.C., ended this week. National Guard troops, however, remain in the capital. The White House is claiming total victory over crime in the district. The facts are a bit more complicated, as NPR's Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: White House data show the monthlong surge of law enforcement and Guard into Washington has resulted in more than 2,000 arrests, hundreds of seized guns and 50 cleared homeless encampments. In a recent speech, President Trump claimed that crime had been reduced to zero.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There's no crime. They said crime's down 87%. I said, no, no, no. It's more than 87%. Virtually nothing. And much lesser things - things that take place in the home - they call crime. You know, they'll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, this was a crime. See? So now I can't claim a hundred percent.
LAWRENCE: D.C. officials say crime had already been dropping for months before the police were federalized. As for the Guard, more than 2,000 of them have been standing watch at train stations and cleaning up city parks. Jay Carey, an Army combat veteran, came to D.C. to protest the deployment of the Guard. He's afraid Guard troops could get caught up in illegal repression.
JAY CAREY: And we're just trying to tell them that they have options, that they can question their orders if they feel like they're illegal - give them a hotline to call and also just talk to them about what they're doing, how they feel about what they're doing.
LAWRENCE: That's more of a concern with the Guard possibly heading to cities like Chicago. After the Trump administration sent Guard to Los Angeles without the consent of California's governor, the state sued. Eleven former generals submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to that case warning against the politicization of the military. It says, in part, deployment of the military within our country's borders to be used against its population is not only contrary to core American values, but can also be harmful to the reputation, integrity and morale of the military itself.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE WESTERLIES' "SARO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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