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Washington, D.C. police officers are alleging to the Justice Department that superiors misclassified crimes to make reported statistics look less serious than the reality, according to a Washington Post report.
Roughly three dozen rank-and-file officers and detectives have lodged complaints with the DOJ as the city faces an investigation into whether crime statistics were intentionally misreported under the Trump administration. In August, President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to D.C., citing a need to combat “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.”
Trump declared that the effort “will go further,” saying the administration was “starting very strongly with D.C.” and promising, “we’re going to clean it up real quick.”
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“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” Trump said at an August 11 press conference, describing the city’s crime conditions as “embarrassing.”
According to officers, MPD leadership has for months — and in some cases years — instructed subordinates to downgrade serious offenses. Some precinct-level reports are said to have contained as many as 150 potentially misclassified incidents in the Southeast D.C. Seventh District alone. In about half of those cases, supervisors later upgraded the charges.
While city leaders and Democrats point to data showing violent crime is at a 30-year low, the DOJ and House Oversight are probing whether those numbers are being masked by internal manipulation.
The DOJ’s criminal probe is being run out of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office.
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One area of scrutiny is a new offense category not currently included in D.C.’s violent crime tallies: endangerment with a firearm, which applies when a gun is fired but intent to harm is unclear. Officers say many shootings not resulting in injuries are being relabeled under that category.
When asked for comment, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, MPD, and the D.C. Police Union did not immediately respond.
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