The Trump administration has accused the Washington, D.C., police department of reporting “phony crime stats” and “cooking the books,” citing the suspension of a police commander for allegedly altering crime data. The U.S. attorney’s office in the district reportedly opened an investigation into whether city officials had manipulated crime statistics.
But experts told us data show a decline in violent crime in Washington in recent years, and the murder rate statistics in particular are “very reliable.”
Here’s what we know about the allegations.
The Metropolitan Police Department released crime statistics on Aug. 11 that showed the number of homicides in the city had decreased by 32% from 2023 to 2024 and by 12% so far from 2024 to 2025, as we’ve written. Violent crime overall for 2024 was down 35% from the previous year and was “the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reported in January.
“In addition to the overall violent crime reduction, homicides are down 32%; robberies are down 39%; armed carjackings are down 53%; assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27% when compared with 2023 levels, with the District reporting the fewest assaults with dangerous weapons and burglaries in over 30 years,” according to the press release from then-U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves.
President Donald Trump, however, declared a “crime emergency” in Washington on Aug. 11 to justify a federal takeover of the city’s law enforcement. He wrongly claimed at a press conference that day, “Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever” in Washington. (The peak murder rate was in 1991.)
The president also issued a memo to deploy the National Guard around the city, and more than 2,000 troops from the district and six states were expected to be deployed as of Aug. 19.
The president discounted the crime data from the MPD, saying at a press event on Aug. 14 that Washington police “are giving us phony crime stats.” A White House release issued Aug. 11 claimed, “Metro Police Department leadership are allegedly cooking the books to make crime statistics appear more favorable.”
In an Aug. 18 Truth Social post, Trump said, “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety. This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!”
The New York Times reported the next day that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington had opened an investigation into “whether city police officials falsified crime data, according to two people familiar with the matter.” That investigation is being conducted by former judge, Fox News host and Trump appointee Jeanine Pirro, who was sworn in as interim U.S. attorney for the district on May 14.
When we asked the White House for evidence that the MPD crime data wasn’t accurate, a spokesperson referred us to a report on NBC4 about an investigation into a police commander for allegedly altering his district’s crime statistics. MPD Commander Michael Pulliam was placed on administrative leave in May “for questionable changes to crime data,” the Washington news station reported. Pulliam denied the allegations.
Gregg Pemberton, chairman of the D.C. police union, told the news station that police department supervisors change crime data to give the appearance that violent crime incidents have fallen. “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,” Pemberton said.
America First Legal, a group founded by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Aug. 14 for all crime data compiled by the MPD and “all email communications or internal guidance reflecting any changes in the department’s tracking or reporting of crimes in the city, as well as any records ‘reflecting the falsification or non-publication’ of crime data and statistics,” including communications related to Pulliam, according to Fox News.
America First Legal also cited an article in the Washington Free Beacon about “a former police sergeant, Charlotte Djossou, who allegedly sued MPD leaders in 2020 for ‘misclassifying offenses’ to deflate D.C. crime statistics,” Fox News reported. Djossou’s lawsuit was settled out of court earlier this month, ABC 7News reported.
We reached out to the MPD for comment on the Pulliam investigation and the White House claims about police data, but we didn’t receive a response.
Police Chief Pamela Smith released a statement to News4 regarding the Pulliam investigation, saying: “The Metropolitan Police Department is committed to upholding the trust and the confidence of the public. Any irregularity in crime data brought to my attention will be addressed immediately. I do not condone any official reclassifying criminal offenses outside the guidelines set in MPD policy. Any allegation of this behavior will be dealt with through our internal processes, which will ensure those members are held accountable. I have the utmost confidence in the command staff leadership currently in place across the Metropolitan Police Department.”
Asked by News4 about the Pulliam investigation, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Aug. 12, “[W]e are completing that investigation and we don’t believe it implicates many cases.”
Pemberton, from the police union, told NBC News, “I think that there’s a possibility that crime has come down,” but he questioned the size of the decline reported by the department.
Expert Says D.C. Police Murder Stats ‘Very Reliable’
We don’t know the details of the Pulliam investigation or the settlement of the Djossou lawsuit, but we asked independent experts about their overall confidence in the data provided by the Washington police, which those experts used in recent analyses.
“I think the statistics used to determine DC’s murder rate are very reliable,” said Jeff Asher, a co-founder of AH Datalytics, a consulting firm that compiles an aggregation of crime data provided by law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S.
“DC’s publicly available murder statistics match up nearly identically with what is being reported to the FBI and the trends in DC’s murder statistics very closely follow the trends shown in independent sources such as the Gun Violence Archive and a firearm injury dashboard maintained by the DC health department,” Asher told us in an email. “As such, I have high confidence in the reliability of the murder data.”
But, Asher noted, crime data is “inherently imperfect.” His organization conducts “an audit to identify agencies with clear underreporting issues and do not include them in our tallies.”
Asher previously told us that Trump was wrong when he claimed murders were at an all-time high in Washington. “DC’s murder rate in 2023 was 39 per [100,000] which was the highest in the city since 2003. That was still down more than 50% from 1991’s murder rate of more than 80 per 100K when the city had 482 murders. It has also since fallen and is on pace with 2019’s pace so far in 2025,” he said, citing data MPD reported to the FBI.
Regarding the overall crime statistics provided by the MPD, Asher said, “I believe that DC is underreporting data on its public website though I’ll note that crime data issues happen with departments all the time. This does not appear to be an issue in terms of their reporting patterns to the FBI, but the public data is likely overstating a decline” in crime.
Asked about the investigation into the Washington police commander, he said, “I’m skeptical that one commander — especially at a district level — could be responsible for the entirety of underreporting citywide … but I’m not in a position to say one way or the other in this case. I will note that the drop in DC’s robberies in the public data have been fairly uniform across districts suggesting that a single district commander is not responsible.”
Ernesto Lopez, senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent think tank, explained the process used by the CCJ in its Aug. 11 report that found a significant decrease in violent crime in Washington in recent years.
The Aug. 11 report issued by CCJ said that “overall, there is an unmistakable and large drop in reported violence in the District since the summer of 2023, when there were peaks in homicide, gun assaults, robbery, and carjacking. That downward trend is consistent with what’s being reported in other large cities across the country, while the level of violence in Washington remains higher than average in our sample.” The report also said, “The homicide rate in DC fell 19% in the first half of this year (January-June 2025) compared to the similar period last year.”
In compiling its report, Lopez told us in an email, “We perform two checks of the crime data for our crime trends report. First, we verify that the incident counts for Part 1 offenses approximate what is reported” to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. (Part 1 offenses are homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, arson and human trafficking.)
“If the numbers we collect from a local police department deviate by 25% from what is reported in the UCR, we do not include that offense,” Lopez said. “We had 42 cities in our last mid-year report, yet we included aggravated assault statistics from only 23 agencies. That means the aggravated assault counts we collected from 19 agencies significantly deviated from published FBI data. As many law enforcement agencies note, and we do as well, these counts are preliminary and may not match final official numbers.”
“We also generally collect all the data again for each new report and compare past data to newer data. This allows us to see if there was a major shift in how agencies report an offense (or even errors on our end),” Lopez also said.
“For homicide, we perform one additional check and attempt to verify our homicide counts with either a media source or another published source from the police department, such as a year-to-date or monthly summary of crime. If the numbers significantly deviate, we do not include the counts for that city in our report,” he said.
Regarding the claims by the Washington police union chair, Asher, of AH Datalytics, told us, “It’s absolutely possible for municipal leaders to pressure officers to drop crime counts. There are tons of examples of this but it’s a relatively rare occurrence. More often than not the explanation of underreporting is a benign reporting issue which may or may not be the case here.”
Lopez, of the Council on Criminal Justice, also noted, “The political rhetoric around crime is not straightforward. While local leaders may attempt to present crime as less serious, the opposite can also be true. Crime can be used as a tool to promote a tough-on-crime political agenda to garner support for policies.”
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