WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, when confronted with data showing crime here already declining before he took over the city’s police force, has repeatedly dismissed the data as fake and manipulated.
But with the same agency now reporting continued drops in crime, his White House is eager to tout data it once derided as untrustworthy.
“Total crime in D.C. is down 19% and violent crime is down 30%,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during Thursday’s press briefing, ticking off double-digit percentage reductions in homicides, robberies, car thefts and assaults. “These numbers prove the president’s bold actions to make D.C. safe and beautiful again are working just like he said they would.”
The numbers come from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, which the president had previously accused of releasing fake crime data to create a false impression of safety. (The White House confirmed to HuffPost it’s using MPD numbers but declined to comment.)
The embrace of the city’s crime statistics is no surprise from an administration that bragged about positive economic data all year, only to fire its head statistician as soon as the jobs numbers went south. It’s not complicated: The White House now likes D.C. crime data because the positive numbers reflect well on the president.
When Trump first announced he’d commandeer city police, in response to a supposed “crime emergency” that coincided with a teenage assault on an administration staffer, city leaders and national Democrats all pointed out violent crime had fallen to a 30-year low. The trend went against Trump’s claims that the city was an increasingly violent hellscape, so he said it wasn’t true.
“D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this month, announcing an investigation into alleged manipulation of data by D.C. police. “This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!”
Members of the North Carolina Army National Guard’s 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team patrol near the US Capitol on the National Mall in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. President Donald Trump threatened that prosecutors would seek the death penalty for anyone found guilty of murder in Washington, D.C., a move that would escalate his crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In addition to controlling the D.C. police, Trump swarmed hundreds of federal agents and called in the National Guard. The White House has touted nightly arrest totals, nabbed immigrants and made a dramatic video out of arresting the guy who hit a fed with a sub.
Even after the administration had begun bragging about falling crime over the past week and a half, Trump continued bashing the city’s stats. At the outset, the numbers suggested that violent crime had dropped 26% so far this year, after falling 35% the previous year.
“They have to stop issuing false crime numbers,” Trump said Tuesday at the White House. “What they did is they issued numbers that it was ‘the best in 30 years.’ It’s not the best. It’s the worst. They gave phony numbers and they fired the man that did not want to write the phony numbers.”
The allegation that the numbers had been manipulated originally came from the city’s police union, which said a commander in one of the city’s seven police districts had falsified crime data by incorrectly categorizing certain offenses in that district. The commander has been put on administrative leave; Fraternal Order of Police chairman Gregg Pemberton has claimed the problem is widespread.
“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 NBC News in July.
The police union didn’t respond to a request for comment. On social media, the union has pointed to falling crime statistics, apparently from MPD, showing the success of the federal intervention.
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have continued suggesting the city’s crime data is bogus as they run their own investigation of the matter.
“A whistleblower with firsthand knowledge has told the Oversight Committee that D.C. crime data is being widely manipulated under orders from top D.C. police leadership,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Monday on social media.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank that analyzes crime statistics, has said there’s been an unmistakable drop in D.C. crime since 2023, one that tracks with crime trends in other cities, but that the capital has more violence than most.
Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow at CCJ and an associate professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University, said a city’s crime trends are more complex than just “up” or “down,” with patterns varying from neighborhood to neighborhood. But he said the way D.C.’s numbers have been “politicized” isn’t helpful.
“How are you gonna call it cooked, and then turn around and use it?” Johnson told HuffPost. “It confuses the people and causes them to be uncertain on what to believe.”
When Trump announced the takeover, saying the city was overrun by roving gangs and maniacs, with innocent residents cowering in their homes, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) pushed back.
“I believe that the president’s view of D.C. is shaped by his COVID-era experience during his first term, and it is true that those were more challenging related to some issues,” Bowser said. “This year, crime is not just down from 2023. It is also down from 2019, before the pandemic, and we are at a 30-year violent crime low.”
This week, Bowser and Trump were essentially singing from the same song sheet, as the mayor held a press conference to announce double-digit percentage declines in various crime statistics, especially carjacking, since the Trump takeover started. It’s unclear how much of the 21% increase in arrests compared to the same period last year can be attributed to the presence of federal police. Most arrests are made by the MPD, often with officers from federal agencies backing them up. But Bowser suggested the extra help made up for a long-standing shortage of MPD personnel.
20 Years OfFreeJournalism
Your Support Fuels Our Mission
Your Support Fuels Our Mission
For two decades, HuffPost has been fearless, unflinching, and relentless in pursuit of the truth. Support our mission to keep us around for the next 20 — we can’t do this without you.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
“Having more federal law enforcement officers on the street, we think, having more stops that got to illegal guns, has helped,” Bowser said. “We think that there’s more accountability in the system, or at least perceived accountability in the system, that is driving down illegal behavior. We know that we have had fewer gun crimes, fewer homicides, and we have experienced an extreme reduction in carjackings.”