I don’t know if Journolist or something like it still exists but after President Trump announced yesterday that he was federalizing the DC police force to clean up crime in the city, every major news outlet responded with the same talking point. From the NY Times:
President Trump on Monday took federal control of the police force in the nation’s capital for 30 days and mobilized 800 National Guard troops to fight crime in a city that he claimed was overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals,” even though crime numbers in Washington are falling.
From the Washington Post:
Violent crime in D.C. has been on the decline since 2023, when a generational spike in killings rendered the nation’s capital one of America’s deadliest cities, plunging communities into grief and igniting a local political crisis that escalated to Congress.
From CNN:
President Donald Trump, justifying his temporary federal takeover of policing in the nation’s capital, claimed at a press conference Monday that the violent crime situation in Washington, DC, “is getting worse, not getting better.” He asserted in an executive order that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia” and that there is “rising violence in the capital.”
But violence in the capital is actually falling. After a spike in 2023, violent crime declined in 2024 and has declined again so far in 2025.
It’s true that crime in the city is going down but it’s also true that it remains very high when compared to other big cities. That was a point Trump specifically made and one which many news outlets seem eager to ignore. We get all the stats about how DC crime is down but none about how it’s still higher than many US cities.
Today Megan McArdle tries to correct that by arguing first that Trump is right about crime in DC. It remains far too high and something should be done to fix it.
I make a point of agreeing with President Donald Trump whenever he is right about something, and I’m afraid he is right that in D.C., crime and disorder is a major problem. It is not as big a problem as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, “somewhat less of a problem than it was” is not really very good news…
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.
Motor vehicle thefts tell a similar story. (I focus on these two crimes because they are somewhat less vulnerable to changes in reporting or statistical methods — bodies are hard to hide, and car thefts are the best reported property crime.) In 2024, New York had almost three times as many cars stolen as D.C. — in a city that has over 10 times our population. Even adjusting for higher rates of car ownership, that’s a huge difference.
So it appears crime is down but still higher than comparable cities. McArdle isn’t convinced this is a problem Trump’s federalizing of police will help but he has a point about the crime.
There is also another wrinkle in this story. There’s some evidence the crime stats were juked to make them look good.
The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint.
The union claims police supervisors in the department manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year.
Pulliam — the former commander of the 3rd District that patrols Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights — was placed on leave with pay and told he was under investigation for questionable changes to crime data, five law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told News4…
“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.”
So maybe crime is down in DC or maybe part of this decline is the result of cheating the stats. Whatever the case, crime in DC remains too high and that’s the point of comparison (to other large cities) that the media seems happy to ignore or downplay.
Of course having taken over DC’s police department, it will now fall on the Trump administration to demonstrate some real change. I’m all for what Trump is trying to do here, but you can bet the media will now start reporting every carjacking as his personal failure.
