In Washington, D.C., simple assault, a misdemeanor offense, is defined as “any attempt or effort, with force or violence, to do injury to the person of another.” But the city’s police department does not count it as a “violent crime.” That designation is reserved for “assault with a dangerous weapon,” a felony offense.
The district recorded 1,026 incidents of assault with a dangerous weapon in 2024, down 27 percent from the year prior. In 2025, it has thus far recorded 534 such assaults, a 20 percent drop from the 668 the district recorded over the same time period in 2024. There’s just one problem: The real numbers are likely higher.
In July, just weeks before President Donald Trump announced his crackdown on crime in D.C., the city’s police union head, Gregg Pemberton, accused police lieutenants and captains of ordering lower-level members to “take a report for a lesser offense” in an attempt to make violent crime stats fall. One D.C. police commander, Michael Pulliam, is under investigation for manipulating those stats, NBC’s D.C. affiliate reported.
It’s far from the first time such accusations have come to light. Leaders of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department were accused of rigging the city’s crime stats as early as 2019.
During a 2020 city council hearing, two D.C. police officers blew the whistle on their superiors, accusing them of misreporting violent crimes as misdemeanors to make the nation’s capital appear safer on paper. In one August 2019 incident they detailed, a man slashed a woman’s face and neck with an unknown object outside a liquor store, sending her to the hospital. The alleged crime fit the definition of felony “assault with a dangerous weapon,” but records obtained by WUSA9 showed that D.C. police classified the incident as a “simple assault” in its report, a misdemeanor that the department does not count as a “violent crime.”
Later, in December 2019, a man allegedly grabbed his boyfriend and held a knife to his neck during a night of heavy drinking. The D.C. police were called, but again, the force reported the alleged attack as a misdemeanor “simple assault,” according to WUSA9.
Neither case ended up being prosecuted.
The accusations raise questions about a narrative that has dominated mainstream media reports in the wake of Trump’s crackdown: that violent crime in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low. The claim, regurgitated in recent New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico coverage, stems from a January press release from former president Joe Biden’s Justice Department, which lauded D.C. for reporting “the fewest assaults with dangerous weapons and burglaries in over 30 years.”
None of that coverage mentioned the allegations surrounding D.C.’s crime stats or the suspended commander.
D.C., meanwhile, is far from the only police force to face such allegations. Departments across the country have admitted to misclassifying instances of violent crime as misdemeanors since 2012. Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund policy director Sean Kennedy attributed the phenomenon to the incentives police departments have to reduce the rate of violent crime on paper at any cost. Doing so, he said, provides them with bonuses, accolades, and, in the case of political pressure, data that can be used to minimize concerns over crime.
“Everybody up the chain wins when crime goes down on paper, regardless of whether it goes down in reality,” Kennedy told the Free Beacon. “There’s a precedent for this. Everyone who touches the data has an incentive to go along with it, from the line cop who has to do less work to the commander, who gets bonuses, accolades, or promotions.”
The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, acknowledged in 2015 that it misclassified some 14,000 serious assaults as minor offenses from 2005 through 2012, an error that artificially lowered the city’s violent crime rate by 7 percent, the Los Angeles Times reported.
In 2012, the New York City Police Department admitted in an internal report that at least one precinct was systematically underreporting crime, according to Reuters. A study conducted the same year included interviews with hundreds of retired NYPD officers who said they knew of three or more instances in which department leaders rewrote a crime report to downgrade the offense, the New York Times reported.
More recently, in April 2024, the New Orleans Police Department admitted that it underreported more than 400 rape cases in 2021 and 2022, citing technical issues with its record management system.
The misreporting of crime statistics has given some cities ammunition to falsely claim victory in the fight against violent crime when such incidents rose in reality. That includes Columbus, Ohio. In 2013 and 2014, the city touted a supposed drop in violent crime. By late 2024, residents learned that it never actually occurred.
“In fact, violent crime rose in Columbus in those years,” the Columbus Dispatch reported.
The Metropolitan Police Department did not return a request for comment.
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