The man in the red shirt lifted the gun high enough for everyone in the Exxon parking lot to see.

It was late on a Thursday in August, the neon lights of Georgia Avenue in Washington reflecting off car hoods and gas pumps, when prosecutors say a 58-year-old man shoved another during an argument and pulled out a pistol. According to a federal complaint signed by an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the weapon was a “ghost gun,” built from parts with no serial number, one round chambered and 11 more in its extended magazine.

Police cruisers pulled in with lights flashing. A sergeant raised his service weapon and ordered the man to drop his gun. Photographs filed in court show he complied, setting it on the roof of a car. The suspect, who had a prior felony conviction, was charged with unlawful possession in federal court.

President Donald Trump has cast such arrests as proof of a turnaround and has suggested it could expand to other cities. From the Oval Office last week he said his deployment of National Guard and other federal resources into the capital had produced 1,007 arrests and 91 firearms seized since Aug. 11, with no homicides recorded since Aug. 13. He called Washington “one of the safest cities in the world.”

City data released Wednesday show violent crime dropped 45% in the first 20 days of the surge compared with the same period a year earlier. That includes declines in homicide, robbery and assaults with dangerous weapons. Carjackings fell 87%, from 31 to four. Property crimes fell 12%. Police reported 1,516 arrests during the period, up 20% from last year, and 191 firearms recovered.

That’s welcome news to many in the nation’s capital, but the impact of the federal effort in those declines isn’t as clear as the Trump administration claims. Court dockets tell a different story. Bloomberg News reviewed more than 150 pages of arrest documentation and identified dozens of specific cases.

While only a handful of cases have landed in federal court, most involve traffic stops, open containers, scuffles and unlicensed guns now carrying the weight of federal prosecution. The majority of arrests are still routed to Superior Court, which handles lower-level offenses, while U.S. District Court takes the most serious crimes.

Jonathan Fahey, a former federal prosecutor and ex-acting immigration enforcement director under Trump, said what has changed is manpower, not the nature of enforcement. “It’s not meaningfully different than what DC police would handle — most of it’s traffic stops and unlicensed guns,” he said. “The difference is you’re putting more resources toward the same crimes.”

That’s an argument pushed by Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who has to navigate the frustration of many local residents over the influx of armed troops in the streets with the reality that Trump and Congress can quickly override her administration, thanks to the District’s unique status as the federal capital.

Bowser said the statistical declines, especially in carjackings, reflect a “sense of accountability” created by more stops and gun seizures. She credited the influx of federal officers with boosting visible enforcement, but said the reliance on masked immigration agents and out-of-state National Guard troops risked eroding trust.

The mayor said she told Trump and his senior aides that if the city had 500 more local officers, “those same arrests and gun recoveries likely would have been made.”

The White House praised Bowser’s remarks while pushing back on criticism, noting that almost half of the first week of arrests occurred in Wards 7 and 8, which have the city’s highest violent-crime rates. Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and a former police officer, said the administration’s framing obscures more than it explains.

“It’s not like they are charging a bunch of kingpins,” he said. “They’re just casting a wide net. I mean, look at the middle of the whole ocean. You gotta catch a whale, right?”

Johnson added that the evidence so far underscores how few serious prosecutions the federal surge has produced, and suggested the impact won’t be lasting.

“These minor arrests aren’t going to have long-term public safety value,” he said.

Court records largely describe incidents that would normally be handled locally. There was the case of a man who drove onto a sidewalk in Southeast Washington before crashing into a tree and fleeing into Fort Circle Park, where marshals tackled him and recovered a pistol nearby.

Another incident began outside a grocery store on Florida Avenue Northeast, where officers stopped a man with a satchel they said held two pistols, including a ghost gun. A magistrate judge later said the stop appeared unconstitutional and dismissed the case.

Many cases involve firearms — pistols in backpacks, revolvers with serial numbers filed off, guns stashed under seats. Other filings echo routine patrol work, including driving under the influence and public fighting. Police reported finding a man asleep in a Honda on South Capitol Street with music blaring, an open bottle of tequila in the back seat and a loaded revolver in the glove box.

The affidavits also illustrate who is patrolling Washington now. One FBI investigator from Massachusetts who usually works foreign bribery cases signed a firearm affidavit. A supervisor from New Orleans who typically focuses on white-collar crime wrote up a ghost-gun case. A Wisconsin-based agent swore out an assault complaint.

Erin Murphy, a professor at New York University School of Law and a former D.C. public defender, said the surge feels more like an occupation than community policing. She warned that pushing low-level cases into federal venues risks turning court into “an assembly line.”

Trump has suggested the Washington model could be deployed in other cities, targeting “Democratic-run” constituencies including Chicago. There is even speculation that other cities, such as New York and San Francisco — where Trump foil and California Governor Gavin Newsom was once mayor — could also see a surge.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, who has cultivated a working relationship with Trump, rejected a federal deployment to his city, saying his administration has already reduced crime and gotten thousands of guns off the streets.

“Our communications with the federal government is: ‘We got this,’” he said in an interview. “We're going to continue doing an amazing job.”

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