Media outlets are fact-checking President Donald Trump’s concerns about violence in Washington, D.C., by pointing to misleading crime statistics.
Trump has moved to increase federal law enforcement’s footprint in D.C.’s streets and take over the local police department after a former Trump administration staffer was assaulted by a mob during a carjacking on August 3. Legacy media outlets and Democratic lawmakers responded to Trump’s complaints about violent crime in D.C. by reporting that it decreased by 35% in 2024, citing local police data that leave out crimes such as felony and aggravated assault, thereby making D.C.’s crime problem appear better than it is since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020.
MAKE D.C. SAFE AGAIN
pic.twitter.com/xJRIcgy4ld
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 11, 2025
D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) only includes homicide, sex abuse crimes, assault with a dangerous weapon and robbery in its overall “violent crime” numbers that show a decline in 2024. Aggravated assault and felony assault without the use of weapons are left out, despite D.C. law describing them as violent offenses causing bodily injury and despite the fact that aggravated assaults are increasing, according to the FBI.
“Felony Assault does not fall under the D.C. Index violent offense categories,” the MPD told the Daily Caller News Foundation without answering specific questions.
The FBI includes a broader range of assaults in its violent crime data for D.C. based on what local police provide to the bureau. Consequently, the FBI’s data show that the number of violent offenses in D.C. only decreased by 10% in 2024 and remained slightly higher than in 2018.
The FBI’s numbers also show that homicides have remained higher than pre-pandemic levels in the years since 2020, with the exception of 2021, a year when D.C. submitted incomplete data, according to Axios. Additionally, D.C. saw 12% more aggravated assaults with or without a weapon in 2024 than in 2023 and 37% more than in 2022, per the FBI.
Research from the Rochester Institute of Technology also shows that D.C.’s murder rate in 2024 was the fourth highest in the country, above Chicago, Illinois, Atlanta, Georgia, Compton, California, and New York City. The institute’s study cites FBI data, local news reports and individual agency websites. Two Israeli Embassy workers and a congressional intern are among the most high-profile D.C. murder victims in 2025.
“Unfortunately, while Fake News journalists and politicians go out of their way to claim otherwise, the reality is that our nation’s capital is anything but safe,” the White House said in a Monday statement highlighting the Rochester Institute of Technology data.
The D.C. Police Union, which represents 3,000 officers, has also accused the MPD of falsifying crime statistics to make it appear that violence has decreased, NBC4 Washington reported in July. The MPD reportedly suspended a police commander in May and began investigating him for allegedly making suspicious changes to the statistics for his area of D.C. Such manipulation of data is allegedly common in the department, according to D.C. Police Union Chair Gregg Pemberton.
“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 told NBC4 Washington.
The union did not respond to a request for comment.
Even when crimes were reported, D.C. officials have struggled to prosecute crimes to the fullest possible extent. The district’s crime lab lost its accreditation in 2021 over allegations of misrepresenting evidence and did not regain it until January, leaving a backlog of cases waiting to be properly investigated, WTOP reported.
Former President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) cited D.C.’s incomplete local data in a January press release hailing the Biden administration’s law enforcement efforts.
“It takes time to develop these investigations and prosecutions, but this is the fruit of that labor — a reduction in the violent crime — that D.C. is now seeing,” said former Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, who drew criticism for forcing the DOJ’s Washington office to focus resources on prosecuting hundreds of Trump supporters who protested at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump announced on Monday that he would deploy the National Guard to D.C.’s streets “to help reestablish law, order and public safety.” His administration also placed more federal law enforcement officers throughout the district on Thursday night.
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