DC Fraternal Order of Police chairman Gregg Pemberton said in July that Metropolitan Police Department leaders pressure officers to falsify data and artificially deflate crime statistics
After President Donald Trump announced a federal crackdown on lawlessness in Washington, D.C., mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians claimed violent crime in the nation’s capital has “fallen sharply” and has reached a “30-year low.” Their claims, though, rest on questionable police data that local leaders are accused of falsifying to play down the city’s violent crime problem. The Metropolitan Police Department recently suspended a commander for allegedly manipulating that data, a fact the mainstream reports excluded.
Politico reported Monday that “crime in Washington hit a 30-year low last year” despite the president “declaring a public safety emergency in the District” and attempting to “cast the city as dangerous.” NPR’s story stated Trump ordered the federal intervention “despite the fact that violent crime plunged to a 30-year low last year, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice.” The Guardian similarly claimed violent crime in D.C. “has fallen sharply since 2023” and reached a “30-year low on the day Trump took office” in January.
The hometown Washington Post said that Trump has tried to “cast the capital as overrun with violent youngsters,” arguing instead that crime data “paint a contrasting picture.”
“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,” the Post wrote.
Those publications based their stories on data collected by the MPD, which the Biden administration touted just before leaving office.
“Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the Biden Justice Department claimed in a press release. “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.”
The MPD in July suspended Michael Pulliam, police commander for the Adams Morgan neighborhood, for allegedly manipulating crime numbers in his reports. D.C. Fraternal Order of Police chairman Gregg Pemberton told NBC4 Washington that officials often pressure officers to falsify statistics in order to make the city appear safer.
“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. “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 told NBC4 Washington that MPD leadership directs officers to use loopholes in the FBI’s reporting system.
“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,” Pemberton said. “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.”
The MPD’s statistics, Pemberton told the NBC4 Washington reporter at the time, do not make sense.
“That’s preposterous,” Pemberton said. “There’s absolutely no way crime could be down 28%. Last year they suggested that it went down 34%.”
Several prominent Democratic politicians uncritically echoed the MPD’s findings despite Pemberton’s allegations, which he made several weeks ago.
“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,” former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wrote in a post on X.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) argued in another post that violent crime in D.C. is “at a thirty-year low” and that “Donald Trump has no basis to take over the local police department.”
The MPD has a history of mismanagement that goes beyond the alleged misreporting of crime statistics. Its crime lab lost its accreditation in 2021 over mishandling evidence, among other operational failures, and did not have its credentials restored until earlier this year.
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