The president has deployed the National Guard in DC to combat longstanding crime problems
President Donald Trump on Monday accused Washington, D.C., officials of falsifying crime data to “create a false illusion of safety” and said that the district is now under “serious investigation.”
“D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing! Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour! People are flocking to D.C. again, and soon, the beautification will begin!”
The head of the city’s police union, Gregg Pemberton, has 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.
“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 told the NBC affiliate last month.
“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,” Pemberton added.
It’s far from the first time such accusations have come to light. Leaders of the D.C. police department were accused of rigging the city’s crime stats as early as 2019, the Washington Free Beacon reported. On August 5, the District of Columbia also quietly settled a 2020 lawsuit from a sergeant who accused police department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics, according to court records obtained by the Free Beacon.
Last week, Trump deployed the National Guard in D.C. and placed the district’s police department under federal control to “reestablish law, order, and public safety” in the nation’s capital. The president said that crime is “out of control” in the city and vowed to “put it in control very quickly, like we did on the southern border.”
D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser (D.) has slammed Trump’s moves as not only “unsettling and unprecedented” but also part of an “authoritarian push,” claiming that her city is not experiencing a crime surge. Mainstream media outlets have cited the city’s questionable crime stats to argue that crime in the district is at a “30-year low.”
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