The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics, court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Police brass repeatedly told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, according to internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts the Free Beacon reviewed.
Former MPD sergeant Charlotte Djossou sued the department in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. Djossou, who joined the force after serving honorably in Iraq, accused MPD brass of attempting to “distort crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records showing that police leaders explicitly instructed their subordinates to underclassify certain instances of theft to keep them out of the crime stats the city reports to the public.
The lawsuit, as well as the city’s decision to settle, calls into question the prevailing narrative presented in mainstream media outlets as President Donald Trump carries out a D.C. crime crackdown. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico have all cited data from the Metropolitan Police Department to contend that D.C. crime is low and Trump’s crackdown is unnecessary. That coverage did not mention whistleblowers like Djossou, nor did it disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats.
Though elements of Djossou’s case have previously been reported, the settlement has not. Neither have several exhibits the legal proceedings brought to light, including a 2022 deposition of MPD commander Randy Griffin. At the time of the events in question, Griffin oversaw D.C’s Fourth District in the northernmost part of the city. He confirmed in his deposition that he tasked a police captain, Franklin Porter, with finding “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics” in April 2018.
Porter’s solution, devised alongside former MPD lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky, was to use the “Taking Property Without Right” (TPWOR) classification instead of “Shoplifting” or “Theft,” Griffin confirmed in the deposition. Court records show that Zabavsky—currently serving a 48-month sentence for covering up an unrelated murder case—”acknowledged this was done because TPWOR reports are not tracked in the D.C. Crime Report.”
The plan later became the Fourth District’s operating procedure. On March 12, 2019, MPD captain Sean Conboy sent an email to his officers in which he asked them to reclassify minor thefts as TPWOR offenses.
Djossou reported the misclassification to MPD’s internal affairs office, which opened an investigation later in 2019. The investigative report, included in the lawsuit, contained transcripts of interviews with several officers who corroborated allegations that the department had a policy of downgrading charges.
Sergeant Michelle Starr, for instance, told investigators that there were “emailed directives from the Fourth District management team directing members to use the classification of TPWOR.” The report shows that the number of crimes categorized as TPWOR offenses grew 500 percent after the new directives came down.
The department also had a policy of downgrading violent crimes, according to the lawsuit, with the report noting that Starr informed investigators that “managers at the district routinely changed felony classifications to misdemeanors.”
Porter, one of the two officers who came up with the TPWOR strategy, sent a September 2019 email to the sergeants serving under him ordering them not to classify crimes as felonies if they fell under the categories of “Assault With a Dangerous Weapon,” “Robberies,” “Burglary,” or “Felony Assault.” Instead, he directed them to turn the matter over to their on-duty watch commander to classify the offense.
“If the Watch Commander is not on the scene then call the Watch Commander’s phone number,” Porter wrote. “I don’t want to be notified that we have a part one [felony] offense in an email.”
Djossou reported one case in which a “female was cut (deep open flesh cut) on the side of her face with an unknown object, from her forehead to the bottom of her chin.” While the responding officer had called in the crime as “Assault with a Dangerous Weapon” (ADW), the captain allegedly classified the offense as a “Sick person to the hospital.”
Djossou called Conboy, the captain who ordered officers to use the TPWOR strategy, about another case on Oct. 24, 2019. In this instance, an on-duty watch officer had downgraded an ADW to a “misdemeanor Simple Assault.”
“I feel like they’re downgrading classifications,” said Djossou, according to an MPD transcript of the call. “[The assailant] strangled [the victim], he ended up throwing her over the couch. She had scratches on her neck, her shirt was ripped, and then he threw a knife in her direction close to her head, she moved out of the way.”
Conboy played down the crime, the transcript reads, saying it only “tangentially involved a knife” because the “knife never made contact with the complainant.”
Djossou responded that the knife only missed the victim because she “moved out of the way,” to which Conboy asked whether Djossou would classify a thrown shoe as an ADW and said he did not “see any issues with the current classification.”
Conboy was appointed captain of the MPD’s Research and Analytical Services Branch in 2021, where he was “responsible for overseeing the development of statistical reports, charts, and maps covering crime trends and patterns.” He now serves as commander of the Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, which directs public crime alerts and assists federal agencies with intelligence gathering.
Conboy, Porter, and an attorney for Djossou did not respond to Free Beacon requests for comment. A spokesman for D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser said she had “no comment,” while an MPD spokesman directed inquiries to the D.C. Office of the Attorney General. The office did not respond to a request for comment.
A judge dismissed Djossou’s case after a joint request from both parties on Aug. 5, the same day Trump threatened a federal takeover of law enforcement in D.C. The case had previously been scheduled to go to trial in June, but proceedings ended after both parties said they had “reached a settlement in principle.”
The MPD is one of many police departments to be accused of misclassifying crimes in recent years. The Los Angeles Police Department in 2015 admitted to categorizing approximately 14,000 assaults as minor offenses between 2005 and 2012, decreasing the city’s crime rate by 7 percent. The New York City Police Department acknowledged in 2012 that at least one precinct had systematically underreported crime and hundreds of retired officers said they knew of at least three instances in which the department had done so.
In April 2024, the New Orleans Police Department announced that it had underreported more than 400 rape cases and blamed technical issues in its record system.
In many cities, misrepresentation of statistics leads residents to believe decreases in crime occurred where none existed in reality. Columbus, Ohio, reported a drop in violent crime in 2013 and 2014, but in 2024, citizens learned that violent offenses had actually increased during that time.
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