In Battle Over D.C. Police, Federal Prosecutors Open Inquiry Into Crime Data

New York Times

16 hours ago

The U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., has opened an investigation into whether city police officials falsified crime data, according to two people familiar with the matter, another salvo in the feud between federal and local authorities after the Trump administration seized control of law enforcement in the nation's capital.
The investigation is likely to prompt new criticism that the administration is using the levers of the criminal justice system to pursue the president's political opponents. In justifying his takeover of the city's police force, President Trump has claimed crime in Washington is worse than the statistics show.
How tabulating crime data from the local police could amount to a federal crime is not immediately clear, the two people said, though the effort aims to determine if there were false statements or fraud involved in producing the data.
Prosecutors working for the U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, opened the investigation in recent days, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing inquiry.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In wresting control of the police force, Mr. Trump and his allies have challenged the accuracy of the District of Columbia's crime statistics. They have pointed to a police official in the city's Third District who was suspended this year in the middle of an internal inquiry into whether he downplayed the seriousness of some crimes. The head of the local police union has also claimed, amid a litany of complaints about the department's senior leadership, that crimes have been deliberately undercounted.
Mayor Muriel Bowser has said that the matter involved data anomalies in one of the city's seven districts. 'We are completing that investigation, and we don't believe it implicates many cases,' she told NBC4 Washington in recent days.
Since last Monday, Mr. Trump has declared an emergency in Washington, taken authority over the Police Department for 30 days and sent hundreds of National Guard troops and additional federal agents onto the streets to conduct patrols and stop cars, giving them a high-profile presence in daily life.
City officials have challenged the rationale for such an aggressive assertion of power, noting that most major categories of crime have been falling since 2023. Homicides, for instance, have dropped 11 percent so far this year compared with the same period last year.
In April, the same U.S. attorney's office that is investigating the city's crime data heralded its figures, praising a 25 percent drop in violent crime in Washington in the first 100 days of Mr. Trump's administration.
Last week, however, the president declared that crime in the capital was out of control and that his Justice Department would take over law enforcement work in the city.
The standoff between federal and local authorities deepened after the city's attorney general sued the administration on Friday over its efforts to tighten its grip on law enforcement. A day earlier, the Justice Department declared it would curb the police chief's authority and demanded that local officers aid in immigration enforcement.
The two sides reached a tentative truce on Friday, in which the police chief, Pamela A. Smith, retains authority over the Police Department but her officers may be more helpful to immigration enforcement efforts. A federal judge may hold a hearing on the issue this week.
Federal prosecutors are not the only ones trying to find evidence of a coverup on crime figures in Washington.
Last week, a group founded by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, America First Legal, said it was seeking police and city documents about possible problems with crime data.