Calling crime data "fake news," Trump seizes DC police

Lies, manipulated data, unsubstantiated allegations, and an unprecedented federal takeover.

A DC Metropolitan Police Department car is parked near a rally against the Trump Administration's federal takeover of the District of Columbia on August 11, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

In an executive order signed on Monday morning, President Trump announced a federal takeover of the DC's police department. Attorney General Pam Bondi is now in charge of the city's police force. Trump also said he would deploy 800 National Guard troops on the streets of the nation's capital.

According to Trump, these actions are required because "crime is out of control in the District of Columbia" and the city is being overrun by "bloodthirsty criminals." Trump claims that "rising violence in the capital now urgently endangers public servants, citizens, and tourists, [and] disrupts safe and secure transportation and the proper functioning of the Federal Government." He says the situation "demands an effective law-enforcement mechanism capable of halting the precipitous rise in violent crime."

Trump's claim that there is a "precipitous rise in violent crime" in DC is directly contradicted by official crime statistics. In January, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that "[t]otal violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years." According to city data, violent crime has declined by an additional 25% in 2025 year-to-date. Crime data expert Jeff Asher says that number could be potentially overstated due to differences in how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and DC categorize certain offenses. Nevertheless, he says that no matter how you slice the data, "[v]iolent crime is still declining" in DC. After looking at a variety of sources, Asher concludes there is "a strong downward trend in the crimes with the highest cost to society in the nation’s capital."

But even if crime is declining in DC, is DC still more dangerous than other large American cities? According to newly released FBI data for 2024, among cities with populations over 200,000, DC does not rank among the top 20 for violent crime rates per capita.

The White House also highlighted the murder rate in DC, which did spike in 2023 but has been declining rapidly since. The DOJ reported that homicides declined 32% in 2024. City data shows murders have declined by another 12% in 2025.

Among cities of 250,000 people or more, DC's murder rate ranks seventh. Although every homicide is tragic, DC's murder rate is now lower than or similar to that of many other major cities.

Instead of looking at the authoritative data that the FBI published regarding 2024 earlier this month, the White House sought to defend Trump's claims with a screenshot of a New York Post article, which in turn cited an outdated report published by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in February 2025.

The RIT report was written before the murder rate in Memphis, Cleveland, Kansas City, and many other cities was available. It also misstates the murder rate by relying on population estimates from worldpopulationreview.com, instead of official figures from the U.S. government.

The international bait-and-switch

On Monday, the White House posted a chart on X comparing DC’s murder rate to other cities around the world. Trump stated during Monday’s press conference that the “murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth.”

But the chart is deceiving and includes multiple kinds of data manipulation.

First, the Trump administration cherry-picked some of the safest cities in countries known for violence. Trump, for example, cited the murder rate for Mexico City, but did not include Acapulco, which had a homicide rate of 102 per 100,000 people in 2024 — about four times higher than DC's rate. Numerous Mexican cities have much higher murder rates than DC, including Colima (126), Tijuana (91), Celaya (86), Cuernavaca (74), and Juárez (71), according to a report by the Mexican organization Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.

The Trump administration also included Bogota, Colombia, in the comparison. But it failed to mention that several other cities in Colombia had much higher homicide rates than DC in 2024, including Santa Marta (45) and Cali (42).

The Trump administration chart also highlights the murder rates of cities within countries that have much stricter gun control laws than the United States. For example, the chart includes the homicide rate in London, without mentioning that England’s gun control laws are “among the toughest in the world.” The chart includes the murder rate from Paris, France, a country that also has strict gun control laws and has taken aggressive steps to reduce gun ownership.

White House claims DC crime data is rigged

Since DC's crime statistics directly contradict Trump's claims, the White House sought to discredit the data. (Sound familiar?)

The White House accused people citing DC crime statistics of attempting to "gaslight" the public and claimed that DC crime stats were manipulated.

The allegation, however, was made by Fraternal Order of Police chairman Gregg Pemberton. A complaint filed with DC’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel last year alleged that Pemberton "deceptively edit[ed] videos of the organizers of the so-called ‘J20’ protests… in order to remove footage that would be helpful for the protesters’ defense and obscure the source of the videos." According to the complaint, Pemberton received the video from Project Veritas, a notorious far-right activist group. Previously, Pemberton also admitted to “conduct unbecoming of an officer” when he billed the department for overtime to attend his own court date after being charged with DUI.

Moreover, Pemberton is alleging a systemic conspiracy to manipulate crime data but has provided no documentation, no examples of cases where the alleged misclassification occurred, and no other proof to substantiate his claims. An independent audit of DC's crime statistics conducted last year, when Pemberton was making similar claims, found there was nothing to substantiate the allegation that crime in DC is significantly higher than the reported numbers.

Trump encourages police brutality in DC

Already, Trump is using his false claims about crime in DC to encourage and justify police brutality.

During the Monday press conference, Trump encouraged police to adopt a ‘you spit and we hit’ approach toward DC residents. “And they can hit real hard,” he added. Under previous presidents and local Democratic officials, Trump said police had been told “they’re not allowed to do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”

This attitude about policing is reminiscent of the tone Trump took during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, when he infamously called protestors “thugs” and posted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

In his second term, Trump has already taken steps to make it more difficult to hold police accountable for excessive force and other forms of misconduct. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order directing a federal database of police misconduct to be decommissioned. In April, he signed another executive order directing the DOJ to prosecute any local officials who “unlawfully [prohibit] law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety.” In May, the Justice Department dropped several investigations and oversight agreements related to civil rights violations by local police departments.