MPD sergeant Carlos Bundy said in his suit against the department that the misclassifications have ‘allow[ed] murderers to remain on the street’
A veteran Metropolitan Police Department officer alleged in an ongoing lawsuit that law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C., misclassified apparent murders in an effort to artificially deflate the district’s homicide numbers, according to documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, presenting a “danger to public safety” by “allowing murderers to remain on the street.”
MPD sergeant Carlos Bundy, who has served in the department for 28 years and was in the MPD’s homicide unit from 2010 to 2018, alleged police management has been “mis-categorizing deaths as something other than a homicide in order to keep the District’s homicide numbers down.” Bundy said the MPD “purposely misled the public about the homicide rates in the District of Columbia” by “misclassifying unnatural deaths (for example, by labeling them as accidents).” He also claimed his supervisors retaliated against him after he raised concerns about the practice, denying him days off and lowering his evaluation scores, among other punishments.
Bundy’s allegations are similar to accounts from other MPD officers who said department leaders misclassified theft and aggravated assault cases as lesser offenses in order to depress the district’s crime rates. D.C. recently settled another whistleblower retaliation lawsuit brought by former MPD sergeant Charlotte Djossou, who 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,” the Free Beacon reported last week.
The lawsuits appear to bolster claims from President Donald Trump that the D.C. government has pushed “Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety.” The Department of Justice recently launched an investigation into the matter. Last week, Trump deployed the National Guard to “address the epidemic of crime in our Nation’s capital” and said the district is getting safer “every single hour!”
Democratic leaders, including former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), objected to the move. They cited the district’s statistics—which reported a 27-percent drop in violent crime this year and an 11-percent drop in homicides since last year—as evidence the Democratic council and mayor have a handle on crime. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico have also cited MPD statistics to argue against Trump’s crackdown.
But Bundy’s ongoing lawsuit, which he filed in 2021 and is scheduled for a mediation hearing next year, raises questions about the accuracy of D.C.’s homicide numbers. The sergeant said he noticed “improper behavior” in both the homicide unit and the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force, a joint project with the U.S. Marshal Service that he joined in 2018.
Bundy cited multiple examples in which MPD officials allegedly classified deaths as “undetermined” or “accidental,” despite having autopsy reports or physical evidence that identified the manner of death as “homicide.” He claimed they also failed to investigate highly suspicious deaths, instead labeling them as non-homicides.
On Nov. 29, 2019, a D.C. man was killed after being struck in the head with a brick. Despite an autopsy report identifying the death as a homicide, crime scene video of the suspect, and cell phone tracking data, the MPD “falsely and fraudulently reported the victim’s death as an accident,” according to the lawsuit.
The following October, another man was found beaten to death in Southeast D.C. The autopsy report determined the cause of death was homicide from blunt force injuries, but the MPD “improperly and fraudulently classified [the death] as undetermined,” according to Bundy’s complaint.
After a man was shot to death on May 2, 2021, the MPD allegedly cleared the case “on the very same day, without any objective investigation” in order to “simply classify the death as being justifiable by a citizen.”
“This shooting was captured on security camera footage,” court documents read. “In sum, an individual was shot in broad daylight, the homicide was recorded, and MPD chose not to investigate the matter, putting the people of Washington, D.C. at risk.”
Bundy alleged that MPD officials also misclassified a January 2021 case in which a woman’s body was found on a bike trail with evidence of strangulation and “obvious foul play.”
“MPD fraudulently classified the decedent’s death as a death of unknown cause initially in order to avoid adding another homicide to its open cases,” he said.
Nearly a month later, an autopsy by the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. During that time, “valuable and key evidence was most likely lost, and a murderer was left to roam the streets of the District,” Bundy claimed.
Neither Bundy nor his lawyer responded to Free Beacon requests for comment. The MPD directed inquiries to the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, which, alongside the office of Mayor Muriel Bowser, did not respond to requests for comment.
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