Is crime in Washington really out of control as Trump claims?
Is violent crime up in Washington DC?
Trump's executive order declaring "a crime emergency in the District of Columbia" mentions "rising violence in the capital". In his press conference he made repeated references to crime being "out of control".But according to crime figures published by Washington DC's Metropolitan Police (MPDC), violent offences fell after peaking in 2023 and in 2024 hit their lowest level in 30 years.They are continuing to fall, according to preliminary data for 2025.Violent crime overall is down 26% this year compared to the same point in 2024, and robbery is down 28%, according to the MPDC.Trump and the DC Police Union have questioned the veracity of the city police department's crime figures.
Violent crime is reported differently by the MPDC and the FBI - another major source of US crime statistics.MPDC public data showed a 35% fall for 2024, while the FBI data showed a 9% drop.So the figures agree that crime is falling in DC, but differ on the level of that decline.The downward trend is "unmistakable and large", according to Adam Gelb, the CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a legal think tank."The numbers shift depending on what time period and what types of crime you examine," said Mr Gelb. "But overall there's an unmistakable and large drop in violence since the summer of 2023, when there were peaks in homicide, gun assaults, robbery, and carjacking."
What about murder rates?
Trump also claimed that "murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever" in Washington DC - adding that numbers "just go back 25 years".When we asked the White House the source for the figures, they said it was "numbers provided by the FBI".The homicide rate did spike in 2023 to around 40 per 100,000 residents - the highest rate in 20 years, according to FBI data.However, that was not the highest ever recorded - it was significantly higher in the 1990s and in the early 2000s.
The homicide rate dropped in 2024 and this year it is down 12% on the same point last year, according to the MPDC.Studies have suggested that the capital's homicide rate is higher than average, when compared to other major US cities. As of 11 August, there have been 99 homicides so far this year in Washington DC - including a 21-year-old congressional intern shot dead in crossfire, a case Trump referred to in his press conference.
What about carjackings?
The president also mentioned the case of a 19-year-old former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who was injured in an alleged attempted carjacking in the capital at the start of August.Trump claimed "the number of carjackings has more than tripled" over the last five years.So far this year, the MPDC has recorded 189 carjacking offences, down from 300 in the same period last year.According to the CCJ, carjacking rose markedly from 2020 onward and spiked to a monthly peak of 140 reported incidents in June 2023.Since July 2025, a citywide curfew has been in force for people under the age of 17 from 23:00 to 06:00.It was introduced to combat juvenile crime - including carjacking - which often spikes in the summer months.
How does crime compare to other parts of the US?
"The level of violence in the District remains mostly higher than the average of three dozen cities in our sample," Mr Gelb from the CCJ told us. "Although it is consistent with what we're seeing in other large cities across the country," he added.The CCJ looks at crime rates across 30 large US cities.Its analysis suggests that the homicide rate in DC fell 19% in the first half of this year (January-June 2025), compared with the same period last year.This is a slightly larger fall than the 17% average decline across the cities in the CCJ's study sample.However, if you take the first six months of 2025 and compare it to the same period in 2019 - before the Covid-19 pandemic - it shows only a 3% fall in homicides.Across the 30 cities in the study, that decrease was 14% over the same timeframe.
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