The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating whether Washington, D.C., officials manipulated crime data after Donald Trump accused the capital city of creating “fake crime numbers” to undermine his federal takeover.
On his Truth Social account Monday, Trump accused D.C. officials of manipulating data to create a “false illusion of safety” while his critics accuse the White House of exaggerating reports of violent crime to justify his unprecedented mandate.
“This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!” Trump wrote.
Last week, the president declared what he called a “crime emergency” to justify his administration taking control of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department while deploying National Guard troops and federal law enforcement agents into the city’s streets, claiming that the White House must “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”
He claimed the city is overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” though reports of violent crime in the city have plummeted alongside national downward trends of violent crime rates.
The capital city “was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World,” he wrote on Monday. “Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour!”
Days before Trump entered office in January, federal prosecutors in D.C. were celebrating that violent crime in the capital “is the lowest it has been in over 30 years.” In April, that same U.S. attorney’s office praised a 25 percent drop in violent crime in Washington within the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
Now, that same office — under the direction of former Fox News host and recently confirmed U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro — has opened an investigation to whether those reports are accurate, according to reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told The Independent that the agency does not confirm or comment on investigations.
The White House has pointed to a previous investigation into D.C. police commander Michael Pulliam, who was suspended earlier this year facing allegations that he made “questionable” changes to crime data, according to a report from NBC4 Washington last month.
A federal investigation is expected to go further than the local probe into Pulliam’s time in office.
The Independent has requested comment from D.C. police.
Despite the administration’s claims that crime is “out of control” in D.C., available data has shown the opposite: 2024 saw the lowest violent crime rates in the capital in roughly 30 years, while reports of violent crime within the first seven months of 2025 plunged 27 percent from last year.
Those rates mirror national downward trends, according to FBI crime data released during Trump’s administration.
Homicides in D.C. are down 11 percent, according to city data. The city’s homicide rate in 2024 was roughly 25 per 100,000 residents — nearly twice the rate in 2012, when it was nearly 14 per 100,000 residents.
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