The city's Democratic mayor and police chief framed the influx as a plus for public safety, though they said there are few hard measures for what a successful end to the operation might look like.

Some of the 800 National Guard members deployed by President Donald Trump began arriving in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, ramping up after the White House ordered federal forces to take over the city’s police department and reduce crime in what the president called — without substantiation — a lawless city.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was placing the D.C. police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions and could expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.