National Guard troops sent to Washington, D.C., to battle “one of the Highest Rates of Crime in the World, more than many of the most violent Third World Countries,” have revealed how many bags of trash they’ve collected during their deployment.
President Donald Trump announced last month he was deploying thousands of troops and federalizing the D.C. police force because the nation’s capital had higher homicide rates than cities that are “notorious” for violence, such as Bogota, Colombia, and Fallujah, Iraq.
But rather than battling cartels or terrorists, the soldiers have been busy picking up trash and spreading mulch, jobs that would typically fall to National Park Service employees.
The Trump administration has fired thousands of federal workers this year, including almost 25 percent of the NPS, leaving the National Guard to assist with more than 40 “beautification projects” around the city.
“Guardsmen have cleaned more than 3.2 miles of roadways, collected more than 500 bags of trash, and disposed of three truckloads of plant waste,” the National Guard said over the weekend in a statement shared by CBS.
Some troops have questioned how the deployment—which is costing an estimated $1 million per day—affects their military readiness.
The presence of soldiers on American streets has also proven to be deeply unpopular with voters, with just 41 percent of respondents saying they approved of the move, a Quinnipiac University poll found last week.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the National Guard for comment.
Trump insists he has made D.C a much safer place as he sets his sights on other Democrat-led cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and New York.
As of Friday, 1,369 arrests had been made during the three-week crackdown, according to the White House. But D.C.’s top prosecutor, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, has not been following through with progress in court. In a couple of high-profile cases, she failed to secure grand jury indictments.
Many of the guardsmen have been sent from Republican-led states—including Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana—that have cities with higher crime rates than Washington, D.C..
Jackson, Mississippi’s homicide rate is a whopping four times higher than D.C.’s, while the murder rate in Memphis is three times higher, and in New Orleans it is double, NPR reported.
House Speaker Mike Johnson struggled to respond when Gov. Gavin Newsom called out a similar disparity between California—where Trump sent National Guard troops earlier this summer—and Johnson’s home state of Louisiana, whose murder rate is four times that of the Golden State.
“Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention. He can name-drop me all, all,” Johnson stammered, “that he wants. He needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this.”
As for the president’s claim that crime in the nation’s capital resembles a third-world country, it’s not clear where he got his Fallujah statistic, since no official figure appears to exist for the city that was the site of some of the deadliest battles of the Iraq War.
In the case of Bogota, it’s true that Washington’s homicide rate was higher last year. But that’s not because Washington has cartel levels of violence—it’s because the Colombian city has managed to bring homicide rates way down since the 1990s.
In 1993, Bogota’s homicide rate was 81.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, but by 2007, it had fallen to 19 per 100,000 inhabitants, and last year it was 15 per 100,000, CNN reported.
That means you’re statistically more likely to get murdered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, than in Bogota, according to an analysis of FBI data by Axios.
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