Cooking The Books In D.C.
The liberal response to Trump’s crackdown on crime in the District of Columbia boils down to this. Trump is lying. Crime is down significantly in D.C. Trump has manufactured a crisis. This is all theater.
Except that’s not true at all.
There has been a lot of discussion about issues surrounding the reporting of juvenile crime in D.C. There is some validity to the concerns. Because D.C. is not a state, its justice system has some unique peculiarities. Juveniles end up being prosecuted by the District’s Attorney-General while the U.S. Attorney prosecutes adults. Therefore, statistics on crimes committed by youths are reported separately from those committed by adults.
The biggest concern seems to be, however, deliberate gamesmanship by D.C. in categorizing and reporting crime. It is hard to look at the evidence, in fact, without concluding that D.C. officials, including police officers, are taking deliberate steps to make things look much better than they are.
“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,” Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg 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.”
The police department's command staff is focusing on two categories to get the numbers to fall, Pemberton said: armed with a dangerous weapon and an injured person to the hospital.
“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 police union has been digging into this charade for some time, according to Pemberton. “What we've heard through our members and through members of management that were willing to talk with the union is that this is a directive from the command staff, is that they wanna make sure that these classifications of these reports are adjusted over time to make sure that the overall crime stats stay down,” Pemberton said. “And this is deliberately done.”
At least one D.C. police commander is currently under investigation for changing the crime statistics in his district. The commander in question was placed on leave in mid-May. According to the accusations, this individual was going into the police computer system and downgrading the category of offenses for which individuals had been arrested. He was deliberately falsifying the records. The police union says they believe he was directed to do so by his superiors and that they suspect this kind of thing is happening District wide.
D.C.’s official crime data shows violent crime is down 28% from last year. “That's preposterous,” Pemberton said. “There's absolutely no way crime could be down 28%. Last year, they suggested that it went down 34%.”
The District also exploits differences in how offenses are categorized in different systems to make things look better than they are. The FBI, in compiling statistics, uses one definition. D.C. uses another. The impact may be hard to understand until you look at a specific example.
In terms of trends, it breaks down this way. In 2024, D.C. claimed a 27% drop in assaults with a dangerous weapon, but the actual numbers show a 7% increase in aggravated assaults. The business of policing has become a word game and all about playing with numbers and definitions.
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In Brentwood, D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhood, people are hanging on for dear life and living their lives around daily robberies and gang activity. In City Hall, they are playing games and writing fiction with numbers. Trump is focused on making life better for the average man and woman. The guys and gals who run the police department seem more focused on cooking the books.
Isn’t it convenient that schools no longer teach enough real math for citizens to be able to look critically at numbers and determine if the numbers represent something that is true or false.
As a former Operations CO in the largest District in one of the 10th largest PD's in the U.S., it was part of my role to categorize crimes, which numbers were provided to the FBI. There was always pressure from the District CO to reduce Part One crimes (Murder, Rape, Robbery, Burglary, Aggravated Assaults, Auto Theft, and Larcenies over $300.00). Even though the city was run by Democratic mayors, in those days, strange as it now seems, the pressure was to reduce crime by locking up bad guys and seeing that they spent quality time in a prison not of their choice. What has changed is that the emphasis on locking up bad guys has gone the way of Christmas Past. It has been replaced with kinder, gentler police departments that go the extra mile to be kinder and gentler to bad guys. That, plus District Attorneys that don't prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, and city politicians that keep passing ordinances that create barriers to putting and keeping dirt bags in jail (cashless bail, increased age of accountability, decriminalizing or raising the threshold of some crimes) has created an insurmountable, unsolvable problem.
Instead of having the wisdom of returning to the days when the term law enforcement meant exactly what it said, the pressure has skyrocketed for departments to cook the books. After all, to politicians it's better to look good than go to the trouble to do good for the citizens.
A lot of cops are now nothing more than over paid report writers. Their reputations have been destroyed by the BLM plague. They are criminally prosecuted or civilly sued for aggressive police work that is consistent with their training and existing law, but inconsistent with a rabid anti police environment. The result is a mass exodus by cops from the departments and an inability of those departments to replace officers with people qualified to be law enforcement officers who actually want to enforce the law. Nothing will change until the citizenry starts voting for people who have the citizens' best interest at heart, rather than their own power and influence in the swamp. Good luck with that!