Trump Distorts Stats in D.C. Police Takeover
On Monday, President Donald Trump announced a surge of federal policing of the nation's capital -- a federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department, the deployment of the district's National Guard troops and an increase in federal law enforcement officers in the city. The reason: “Crime is out of control in the District of Columbia,” Trump's executive order said, referring to “rising violence.”
But as Assignment Editor Alan Jaffe writes, the president distorted the city's crime statistics.
In particular, Trump wrongly claimed at an Aug. 11 press conference, “Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”
Washington’s murder rate did increase in 2023 to the highest rate in 20 years, but it wasn’t the highest ever. And murders have decreased since. In addition, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reported in January that violent crime overall for 2024 was down 35% from the previous year and was “the lowest it has been in over 30 years.”
Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, a consulting firm that produces an aggregation of crime data provided by law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S., told Alan that Trump’s claim about murders reaching an all-time high in Washington “is not accurate. DC’s murder rate in 2023 was 39 per [100,000] which was the highest in the city since 2003. That was still down more than 50% from 1991’s murder rate of more than 80 per 100K when the city had 482 murders. It has also since fallen and is on pace with 2019’s pace so far in 2025.”
A report issued by the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent think tank, said that “overall, there is an unmistakable and large drop in reported violence in the District since the summer of 2023, when there were peaks in homicide, gun assaults, robbery, and carjacking. That downward trend is consistent with what’s being reported in other large cities across the country, while the level of violence in Washington remains higher than average in our sample.”
The CCJ report said, “The homicide rate in DC fell 19% in the first half of this year (January-June 2025) compared to the similar period last year.”
Read our full story for more: “Trump Distorts Violent Crime Statistics in Ordering Takeover and Troops to D.C.”
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