The Justice Department is investigating whether Washington, D.C., police manipulated data to make crime rates appear lower, two senior law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News.
The investigation is being run out of the office of the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, the officials said.
The probe comes after NBC affiliate NBC4 reported last month that a Metropolitan Police Department commander, Michael Pulliam, was suspended and put on leave in May after the department began investigating him for allegedly altering crime data. Pulliam has denied the allegations.
This investigation, however, is expected to go much further, looking at other police and city officials for wrongdoing. It’s unclear at this point what the charges would be.
The Washington Post first reported that the Justice Department had launched a formal probe.
President Donald Trump made reference to the investigation in a post on social media Monday.
“D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety. This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!” he wrote on Truth Social, while touting his effort to make the area safer by mobilizing federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard.
“Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour!” he wrote.
Asked about the post, Trump said, “They are giving us phony crime stats.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser has pointed to D.C. police data indicating that violent crime has decreased 26% compared to last year to argue that Trump’s federal takeover of the department is unnecessary.
The accuracy of those numbers has been challenged by Gregg Pemberton, the head of the D.C. Police Union.
“I think there are some concerns about the accuracy of the numbers,” Pemberton told NBC last week, suggesting there’s likely a “pattern” or “practice” to “try to keep these numbers down.”
“I think that there’s a possibility that crime has come down,” Pemberton said, but not nearly by the amount shown in the data, which he called “preposterous.”
“I have a real hard time believing that the numbers are down that much,” he said.
What we know, what our members know, is that we go call to call to call out on the streets at night, going from robbery to carjacking to stabbing to shooting, and we just know that crime is ubiquitous, and it’s all in every quadrant of the city.So to have people tell us, well, crime is down, you shouldn’t be worried about that. That’s not the reality that we feel on the streets.
Neither the Justice Department nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office is commenting on the investigation. The Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Garrett Grumbach and Garrett Haake contributed.
