Fact Check: President Trump Exaggerates, Misstates Facts On Washington Crime

NDTV

2 days ago

Washington:
President Donald Trump said Monday that his administration will take over policing the nation's capital city in what the Republican said is an effort to bring down rising crime rates in Washington, DC.
But President Trump exaggerated or misstated many of the facts surrounding public safety in Washington, where the crime rate has fallen in recent years, while leaving out much of the context.
Here's a closer look at the facts:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: 'It's getting worse, not getting better. It's getting worse.'
THE FACTS: Statistics published by Washington's Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped in Washington since a post-pandemic peak in 2023.
According to the data, homicides, robberies, and burglaries are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26% compared with this time a year ago.
A recent Department of Justice report shows that violent crime is down 35% since 2023, returning to the previous trend of decreasing crime that puts the district's violent crime rate at its lowest in 30 years.
That report shows that when compared to 2023 numbers, homicides are down 32%, armed carjackings are down 53% and assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27%.
The city's statistics have come into question, however, after authorities opened an investigation into allegations that officials altered some of the data to make it look better. But Mayor Muriel Bowser stands by the data and said Trump's portrait of lawlessness is inaccurate.
'We are not experiencing a spike in crime," Bowser said on MSNBC Sunday. "In fact, we're watching our crime numbers go down.'
PRESIDENT TRUMP: "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."
THE FACTS: In 2023, the District of Columbia recorded 274 murders in a city of about 700,000, its highest number in 20 years. But the city's own crime statistics from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, when the population was smaller, show much higher numbers of homicides.
In 1990, for instance, the city reported 498 homicides. The next year saw 509, and 460 in 1992.
Decades of statistics on crime in the city are available online.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: '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, much higher. This is much higher."
THE FACTS: It's true, but President Trump isn't telling the whole story. Washington does have a higher homicide rate than many other global cities, including some that have historically been considered unsafe by many Americans. But Trump is leaving out important context: the US in general sees higher violent crime rates than many other countries.
While Washington is one of America's most dangerous big cities, others have higher crime rates.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: "This dire public safety crisis stems from a public safety crisis that is directly from the abject failures of the city's local leadership. The radical left City Council adopted no cash bail. By the way, every place in the country where you have no cash bail is a disaster."
THE FACTS: Data has not determined the impact of cashless bail on crime rates. Studies, many of which focus on recidivism of defendants rather than crime rates, have shown mixed results.
A 2024 report published by the Brennan Center for Justice saw 'no statistically significant relationship' between bail reform and crime rates. The nonprofit looked at crime rate data from 2015 through 2021 for 33 cities across the US, 22 of which had instituted some type of bail reform. Researchers used a statistical method to determine if crime rates had diverged in those with reforms and those without.
Mr Ames Grawert, the report's co-author and senior counsel in the Brennan Center's Justice Program, said this conclusion 'holds true for trends in crime overall or specifically violent crime.'
Similarly, a 2023 paper published in the American Economic Journal found no evidence that cash bail helps ensure defendants will show up in court or prevents crime among those who are released while awaiting trial.
'I don't know of any valid studies corroborating the President's claim and would love to know what the Administration offers in support,' Mr Kellen Funk, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies pretrial procedure and bail bonding, told The Associated Press in a July 25 fact check. 'In my professional judgment, I'd call the claim demonstrably false and inflammatory.'
The Trump administration has cited a 2022 report from the district attorney's office in Yolo County, California, that looked at how a temporary cashless bail system implemented across the state to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in courts and jails impacted recidivism. It found that out of 595 individuals released between April 2020 and May 2021 under this system, 70.6% were arrested again after they were released.
Mr Funk, contacted on Monday, noted that Washington, DC, reformed its cash bail system in the 1990s.
'What the President is declaring to be an 'emergency' is a system that has functioned much better than cash-based bail systems for nearly thirty years now, including during the recent historic lows in reported crime in the District,' he said, adding that 'the DC bail system has served as a model for bipartisan bail reform efforts in New Jersey and New Mexico over the past decade.'