Last August when President Trump announced he was sending federal agents in to Washington, DC to help deal with crime, there an almost instant refrain which echoed from every news outlet in the country: Crime has already dropped in DC.
As I pointed out at the time, it really felt like talking points had gone out because every news outlet was saying the same thing and almost none of of them were willing to admit that DC’s version of lower crime was still about 3x-8x higher than in other big cities in the U.S. The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle was one of the few who pointed out Trump had a point.
D.C. had 187 homicides in 2024, or about 27 for every 100,000 residents. That is, to be sure, a massive 32 percent drop from the 273 people who were killed in 2023, but that probably wasn’t much comfort to those 187 people or their grieving families. And it’s horrific compared with Boston, which had 3.7 homicides per 100,000 residents during that same time frame, New York City (4.7) or Los Angeles (7.1). Even a further reduction in 2025 — year-to-date homicides have fallen 12 percent compared with the same period last year — won’t bring those numbers anywhere near where they should be. This is the capital city of our country. We ought to be able to do at least as well as other major cities.
On top of crime being high, there was also an open question about how accurate DC’s crime stats really were.
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.”
And there were more stories about the stats being manipulated which raised suspicion. Not long after Trump’s announcement, the DOJ announced it was looking into those crime stats. And in December the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an interim report saying that DC had in fact juked the stats.
The Committee’s ongoing investigation has heard testimonies from commanders that there are clear pressures placed on MPD personnel to lower the classifications of crime to present to the public the perception of low crime in the District. Specifically, there was an emphasis on the daily crime report (DCR), a public-facing dataset that only includes nine categories of felony offenses, above all other crimes discussed within the highest levels of the MPD. Chief Smith, the commanders testified, was so preoccupied with the statistics of the select crimes that were made public that she incentivized her subordinates to lower those crimes by whatever means necessary.
MPD commanders’ testimonies corroborated concerns about alleged manipulations of crime statistics. In fact, commanders told the Committee that, on numerous occasions, they were not only pressured, but also instructed, to lower crime classifications to lesser intermediate offenses in such a way that those offenses would not be included in the DCR reported to the public.
MPD’s then-Chief Pamela Smith resigned after that report was published. Meanwhile, the Internal Affairs division of MPD was conducting its own internal investigation. Yesterday, City Paper revealed that the investigation had concluded and had sustained the accusations of stats manipulation leveled against 15 high-ranking officials.
The Metropolitan Police Department’s internal investigators have sustained accusations against at least 15 high-ranking police officials—including captains, commanders, and assistant chiefs—in a sweeping investigation into crime statistics, according to two sources familiar with the matter…
One of IAD’s findings, according to a source, is that Second District Cmdr. Tatjana Savoy directed two captains to reclassify as many as 390 thefts as taking property without a right, a misdemeanor. Thefts can be classified as felonies or misdemeanors depending on the circumstances, but they are all reported in D.C.’s daily crime report and to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. Reclassifying thefts as taking property could give the appearance that the crime is decreasing. Total thefts dropped by 10 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to statistics posted to MPD’s website.
CIty Paper includes a list of all of the people implicated in this scheme and it’s a long list of captains and commanders plus two assistant chiefs.
Rep. Comer, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent the MPD a letter this week demanding all information on the IAD report. So whatever else is in there will likely be coming out soon. And there’s also an investigation into this by the DC Office of the Inspector General which has yet to drop.
Bottom line: The cheating appears to have been pretty widespread and all of the news outlets who echoed claims that crime in DC was already down last August were repeating bogus stats.
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