ABC News anchor Kyra Phillips on Monday recounted a harrowing encounter she had with a “half-dressed” homeless man who mugged her in downtown Washington, DC, as she noted that many in the nation’s capital are experiencing crime “firsthand” despite what official statistics show.
“I can tell you firsthand here in downtown DC where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died, literally two blocks down here from the bureau,” Phillips explained.
“It was within the last two years that I actually was jumped walking just two blocks down from here,” she revealed.
“And then, just this morning, one of my co-workers said her car was stolen, a block away from the bureau,” Phillips added.
“We can talk about the numbers going down, but crime is happening every single day because we’re all experiencing it firsthand, working and living down here,” the “ABC News Live” host continued, as she reported on President Trump’s decision to place the city’s police department under federal control and deploy National Guard troops into the streets.
Phillips later described her encounter with the mugger as “scary as hell,” as she interviewed DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro.
“So, I was jumped just two blocks here from the ABC bureau. It was not a minor, though,” she told Pirro, noting that “it’s happened to a lot of people in our building, sadly.”
“He was homeless and half-dressed – clearly wasn’t in his clear mind,” Phillips said of her attacker.
The former CNN journalist said she felt her best option was to fight back.
“It was scary as hell, I’m not going to lie, but I fought back. I didn’t see any weapons in his hands. I felt like it was my only choice,” Phillips recalled.
Trump fumed Monday that DC has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
The president vowed that his administration is “not going to let it happen anymore,” and will remove homeless encampments from all public places, including in parks and underpasses.
The latest data from DC’s Metropolitan Police Department shows violent crime has dropped 26% in the district so far this year, compared to 2024.
Overall crime is down 7% so far, according to MPD.
Trump claimed Monday that the numbers were “phony” and promised that Attorney General Pam Bondi will be “looking into that.”
The president noted that a DC police commander was suspended last month for allegedly falsifying crime data to make trends appear more positive.
Pirro, in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, described DC as an “incredibly violent area” with a crime problem that is so “horrific” that residents have stopped reporting some of it altogether.
“What we’ve got here are people that are not even making complaints about the quality-of-life crimes, whether it’s shoplifting or damaging property or an attempted carjacking,” the DC US attorney said.
“They don’t even call the police,” Pirro continued, arguing that “we’re not even seeing most of the crime that’s occurring.”
The former New York district attorney and Fox News host also argued that the reason Trump’s press conference announcing the DC crime crackdown was “so packed” is because many journalists, like Phillips, have been the victims of crime in the nation’s capital.
“Those reporters in that room – and it was packed to the gills – experience crime themselves,” Pirro said.
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