No, DC Is Not Safer Than Ever: Police Union Alleges ‘Preposterous’ Crime Stats Are Being Cooked

(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Democrats and their allies in the press continue to insist that Washington, D.C. is actually safer than ever amid President Donald Trump’s decision to take control of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), as well as deploy National Guard troops in the city.

Despite the overwhelming number of stories from current and former Washington, D.C. residents — including this author — demonstrating the sorry state of the nation’s capital, critics of Trump’s decision continue to cite one particular statistic in an effort to not just denounce Trump’s solution, but to question if there’s even a problem at all.

“Citing a nonexistent crime crisis, Trump plans to take over the Washington DC police and put troops in the streets of the nation’s capital. Contrary to his claims, violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low,” tweeted The New York Times’ Peter Baker.

“Crime in DC is at a 30-year low. It’s not even in top 10 dangerous cities in US. Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover,” warned MSNBC’s Richard Stengel. “That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.”

“A rambling and incoherent Trump wants to turn DC into his personal police state despite a 30-year low in crime. He’s a pathetic wannabe dictator who wants to distract you from his connection to the Epstein files, skyrocketing costs, and his weak job numbers,” declared Senator Patty Murray (D-WA).

“As you listen to an unhinged Trump try to justify deploying the National Guard in DC, here’s reality: Violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low,” insisted the faceplant-prone Hillary Clinton.

As it turns out, there’s a good reason for the apparent discrepancy between the experience of almost everyone who’s spent any time in D.C. over the last half-decade and the data being cited by Trump’s critics. Last month, an NBC News local affiliate confirmed that an MPD police commander had been placed on administrative leave in May after the D.C. Fraternal Order of Police accused officials of doctoring crime statistics. But wait, there’s more: according to the affiliate, union officials allege that “there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.”

“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,” explained Gregg Pemberton, the local Fraternal Order of Police chairman. “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.”

He continued:

When management officials are directing officers to take reports for felony assault, or if they’re going back into police databases and changing offenses to felony assault, felony assault is not a category of crime that’s listed on the department’s daily crime stats.

It’s also not something that’s a requirement of the FBI’s uniform crime reporting program. So, by changing criminal offenses from, for example, ADW bat or ADW gun to felony assault, that would avoid both the MPD and the FBI from reporting that as a part one or a felony offense.

What we’ve heard through our members and through members of management that were willing to talk with the union is that this is a directive from the command staff, is that they wanna make sure that these classifications of these reports are adjusted over time to make sure that the overall crime stats stay down.

He went on to call the statistics that some seem so obscenely proud of “preposterous.”

By the way, there were 116 homicides in Washington, D.C. in 2017. In 2012, there were only 88.

In 2024 — the utopian final year of Joe Biden’s presidency — there were 187. The year before that, 274 people were murdered in the U.S. capital, which doesn’t even sniff a million residents.

Shouldn’t the Democratic Party — and its mouthpieces in the press — have a little pride? Or, failing that, shame?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.