The National Mall is one of the safest places in Washington, where tourists can take in the capital’s grandeur and residents can relax.
The district that includes the National Mall, Ward 2, is among the least violent in the capital, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department. That calm was punctured on Monday when a gunman exchanged fire with Secret Service agents near the Washington Monument, injuring a bystander.
Last year, Ward 2 recorded the second fewest gun-related violent crimes in the city, according to the data, outranked only by the largely residential and predominantly wealthy Ward 3. So far in 2026, all types of crime have dropped in Ward 2 compared to the same period last year.
Gunfire has occasionally erupted on the mall. Last October, a teenager was shot and injured near the National Air and Space Museum.
In 2023, a 27-year-old was fatally shot outside the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station in the early hours after Christmas Day.
In 2009, an 88-year-old white supremacist opened fire with a rifle at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, killing a security guard.
The history goes back much further, to a time when the mall was still an unrealized idea. In 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot by an assassin at a railroad station where the National Gallery of Art (and a plaque) now stands along the Mall’s northern border. He died weeks later.
The site of Garfield’s shooting has transformed beyond recognition. In 1884, construction of the Washington Monument was completed. In the early 1900s, railroads were cleared and a plan to turn the area into a landscaped, symmetrical park was adopted. The National Mall, first envisioned by the French planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant in 1791 to embody the idea of democracy, was not considered officially complete until 2003, when Congress protected it from any future construction.
It is that democratic public space, centuries in the making, that is now patrolled by National Guard troops. The Washington Monument was the first place they were deployed when President Trump ordered a federal takeover of the city last year, despite a lack of violent crime there and falling crime rates around the capital.
Those troops can often still be seen posted around the monuments and posing with tourists.
