As we’ve all heard in the past week, crime in DC was down sharply last year, though it remains much higher than in other blue cities like New York and Los Angeles. But questions have been raised about how reliable the DC crime statistics really are. It started with an allegation from the police union last month:
The union claims police supervisors in the department manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year…
“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton said. “So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”
Beege wrote about a story from the Washington Free Beacon which revealed a former DC cop had sued the department in 2020 for tweaking the crime stats.
Former MPD sergeant Charlotte Djossou sued the department in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. Djossou, who joined the force after serving honorably in Iraq, accused MPD brass of attempting to “distort crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records showing that police leaders explicitly instructed their subordinates to underclassify certain instances of theft to keep them out of the crime stats the city reports to the public.
Then there was a first hand account from a woman who was sexually assaulted in broad daylight by a homeless man. Her attack led to an arrest and conviction but never appears in DC’s crime stats.
When I asked MPD in 2020 why my incident was not on its crime map, an MPD spokesman said the city only includes 1st degree felonies under its crime stats. That would mean that for every person robbed, assaulted, or sexually abused in anything less than egregious ways, you have not been counted into the total tally. The pain you suffered was not severe enough, according to MPD’s standards.
So if you downgrade crimes so there are fewer first degree felonies, crime just disappears. One incident is an anecdote but several in a row seem to make a trend.
Last night President Trump tweeted about the topic saying DC was “under serious investigation” for giving out fake crime stats.
Today, the DOJ announced it was indeed launching an investigation into how DC has been reporting crime.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., is investigating whether city police officials falsified crime data, according to two people familiar with the matter — another salvo in the feud between federal and local authorities after the Trump administration seized control of law enforcement in the nation’s capital…
How tabulating crime data from the local police could amount to a federal crime is not immediately clear, the two people said, though the effort aims to determine if there were false statements or fraud involved in producing the data.
Prosecutors working for the U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, opened the investigation in recent days, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing inquiry.
The head of the police union continues to say that the crime stats are not accurate, though he thinks crime may have dropped somewhat from 2023.
D.C. Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton, who has publicly said he supports the federal takeover of the local police force, said he doubts that crime is as low as the mayor has touted.
“There’s a, potentially, a drop from where we were in 2023,” Pemberton said on NBC4. “I think that there’s a possibility that crime has come down. But the department is reporting that in 2024, crime went down 35% — violent crime — and another 25% through August of this year. That is preposterous. … We’re out on the street. We know the calls we’re responding to.”
Even the lower numbers Democrats are sighting are only lower compared to a peak in 2023. Here’s a graph from Fox 5 in DC showing the homicide data.
So we’ll see if anything comes of this investigation. There’s enough smoke that it’s worth taking a look to see if someone is cooking the books.
