Fans of “The Wire” will be familiar with the term “juking the stats.” That’s when police departments systematically underreport crime by downgrading serious offenses to lesser ones, which allows leaders to claim the community is safer. Now, confirming our suspicions, investigations by the Justice Department and House Oversight Committee suggest D.C. officials played down crime just like in the classic television show.
No wonder Police Chief Pamela A. Smith announced last week that she would resign in January, after two-and-a-half years in the job. The 57-year-old claimed she wanted to spend more time with her family, but an interim report from House Republicans says department leadership placed “a higher priority on suppressing public reporting of crime statistics than stopping crime itself.” Commanders told investigators that, “on numerous occasions, they were not only pressured, but also instructed, to lower crime classifications to lesser intermediate offenses.”
A separate report from the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. identifies “data integrity issues” and says the city’s “official crime statistical reporting mechanism is likely unreliable” thanks to misclassifications, errors, downgraded classifications.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) attackedthe House report as “a rush to judgement” that “cherry-picked quotes without providing additional relevant context.” Neither investigation accuses Smith of breaking any laws, and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro says “the conduct here does not rise to the level of a criminal charge.” Indeed, classifying crimes is more subjective than it might first seem.
There is no question that crime has receded in Washington. D.C.’s data indicates that homicides fell 32 percent between 2023 and 2024, and the city is on track for another 31 percent decline this year. Motor vehicle thefts declined by a quarter in 2024 and another 22 percent this year. These statistics, the hardest to hide, are generally regarded as the most accurate.
But there have been troubling discrepancies between the District’s public data on harder-to-track crimes and the numbers it reports to the FBI. A police commander was placed on leave this spring over allegations of tampering with reports. The D.C. police union alleges rampant massaging of data. Further investigation will need to review determinations made across individual cases.
Even taken at face value, D.C.’s crime numbers are scandalous. Boston, which is similar in population and per-capita income, had 34 homicides in 2024, while the District had at least 186. D.C.’s homicide rate in 2024 was 7.3 times higher than Boston; twice that of Buffalo; almost four times that of Los Angeles; and almost six times the rate in New York City, according to a report from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The immediate challenge for Bowser is picking Smith’s replacement as chief. Good leaders are wise in setting goals: “ambitious” is good, “unattainable” is not. They are flexible in assessing performance when conditions change and those goals become harder to reach, rather than pressing their subordinates to deliver the impossible.
Such leaders exist. William Bratton revolutionized policing in Boston, New York and L.A. The D.C. government should look for someone in his mold. That might seem a challenging feat, especially with the uncertainty of a mayoral race next year that could saddle the city with a democratic socialist who has championed defunding the police. But out of all the senior police officers in the country, they only have to find one.
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