D.C. police commander LaShay Makal emailed a sergeant under her command in March 2024, asking her to scrutinize the “enormous amount” of thefts reported in their district in Southeast Washington.
The next day, the sergeant confirmed that yes, there were a lot of theft reports. But some, she said, could be recategorized as lesser offenses or as “lost property.” In one case, a person reported televisions missing from their apartment, but the sergeant noted the person hadn’t been there for two weeks and there were no signs of forced entry. “Sounds suspect to me,” she wrote, recommending the incident be reclassified. In all, the sergeant outlined two dozen other reports that could also be changed.
“Thank you,” Makal wrote back. “This is fantastic.”
She forwarded the list to a captain and told her to “handle all those in need of classification changes.” The captain complied with her boss’s request — but in the process possibly violated department policy, which forbids reports to be altered by anyone other than the officer who handled the initial report. She changed all the thefts in the email to other classifications that would not appear in the department’s publicized crime statistics, investigators found.
The incident is one of dozens detailed in a 554-page internal affairs report reviewed by The Washington Post that, investigators say, paints a picture of D.C. police officials manipulating classifications — including of violent assaults, robberies and thefts — as they buckled under pressure from the department’s top brass to reduce crime.
The report, which does not allege that any homicides were inappropriately reclassified, examines interviews with dozens of officers, email and text exchanges and hundreds of police reports, offering a rare glimpse into the agency’s internal investigation process. As a policy, the department does not publicly release the investigations.
The probe now has 13 top D.C. officials facing potential termination, including Makal, who after her time leading the Seventh District was promoted to assistant chief. She declined to comment on the investigation but in interviews with investigators denied directing others to misclassify crime and said she was not aware of the captain changing reports.
While the report does not deny that violent crime has fallen steeply in the District over the past several years, a trend backed up by FBI data, investigators outlined examples of “egregiously misclassified” incidents.
“By improperly classifying crimes or ‘downgrading’ the classifications of events, involved members have thereby deprived citizens of the service they deserve and expect,” the report says. It “not only deprives the public of knowledge of the true numbers and statistics of crimes, but also deprives the individual victims of due process and appropriate resources by undermining the investigative process.”
The report also critiques the leadership of former D.C. police chief Pamela A. Smith, whom investigators said had a “drastic and negative” effect on the department, even as they found no evidence that she ordered the misclassification of crime.
Interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll has said he could not speak on the investigation, only confirming that the 13 officials were put on administrative leave and facing possible termination. He also said the department has started to implement some changes recommended by investigators — and affirmed he still trusts the city’s stats. The probe examines approximately 700 reports it says were improperly altered by officials; the department handles tens of thousands of incidents a year.
“I do have confidence in those numbers,” he said at a news conference Tuesday.
The findings have roiled the 3,100-officer department, shaking up top leadership at a time when D.C. police are already under scrutiny by the Trump administration and other federal officials. President Donald Trump last year used news coverage of investigations into crime statistic manipulation to justify his unprecedented, month-long federal takeover of the local force. The allegations also fueled investigations by the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress.
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Concerns about crime classifications had been quietly circulating through the police department well before last year’s probes.
For one detective lieutenant, alarm bells started going off in January 2024, when he worked in the Seventh District under Makal, according to the internal report. He started to notice a pattern, the lieutenant later recalled to Justice Department investigators, of offenses being recorded in a way that did not match the narrative of police reports. Classifying crimes — particularly in the initial phase, before police complete an investigation — is not always straightforward, but officers are expected to choose the highest offense supported by the facts.
In March of that year, the lieutenant enlisted a detective to help him make a log of the times they believed fellow officers in their district had misclassified a crime. Over the next year and several months, under Makal and her successors, the pair amassed a spreadsheet of more than 150 cases where they thought their colleagues got it wrong — classifying burglary and theft cases as “taking property without right,” a charge that wouldn’t show up in public crime statistics, or categorizing shootings as “injured person to hospital” instead of the more serious offense of assault with a dangerous weapon.
The reports ultimately represented a small percentage of incidents handled by the district, where detectives see between 5,000 and 6,000 cases a year, according to the investigation.
The lieutenant didn’t intend the spreadsheet as a “gotcha,” he told investigators. But he wanted to document the issue, a colleague recalled, because he thought there would come a day when D.C.’s police department would have to answer questions about its crime classifications and statistics.
That day has now come, many believe. Among a slew of other findings spanning multiple ranks and police districts, the internal affairs investigators agreed with most of the detectives’ spreadsheet, saying it presented a “striking picture of the breadth of the misclassification issue in 7D.” That included 40 assaults with a dangerous weapon that were initially labeled as lesser offenses, according to the report. Some reports were changed to the proper offenses, and others remained, the spreadsheet noted.
Makal told investigators she did not participate in conversations with subordinates to influence crime classifications and never told subordinates to change the way crimes were classified. Her communications, she said, were intended to tell staff to look at reports, make sure they were correct and then go through the appropriate channels to remedy any inaccuracies — a statement investigators allege is not true. She also said she did not know why anyone under her supervision would feel pressured to downplay crimes, according to the report.
One captain told investigators he dreaded having to call Makal about a serious crime, saying she would ask him to knock assaults with a dangerous weapon and robberies down to lesser charges, the report says. He recalled an incident in the summer of 2024, when two robberies occurred within minutes of each other. She told the captain to generate just one incident report — but he told investigators he knew the incidents should be classified as not one robbery, but two.
The next morning, the captain recalled, Makal told officials in the district that her classification directives were final and no one should second-guess them, according to the report.
The captain told investigators that he did not report Makal’s behavior earlier because he feared retaliation.
In a police department, he said, “you follow the directives of your supervisor.”
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The Seventh District — where at least two current or former captains and one former inspector also face discipline stemming from the probe — isn’t the only one under scrutiny.
Investigators accused former Second District commander Tatjana Savoy, along with two of her captains, of routinely mislabeling thefts as lower offenses, citing emails showing Savoy “expressly directing reports to be reclassified.” That district includes some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods and busiest commercial strips. Savoy, who is facing termination, could not be reached for comment.
The report alleges that the two captains under Savoy, who also worked on a crime reduction initiative in another district, improperly edited at least 450 police reports combined.
Many of the crime reports analyzed “clearly met the elements of Theft,” investigators wrote. “Such reports, however, were often misclassified, or reclassified.” In interviews, Savoy said she was not aware of the captains’ alleged misconduct — a statement contradicted by her emails, investigators allege.
Allegations have also hit the Third District, which includes Northwest neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle. Former commander Michael Pulliam has been on administrative leave for about a year over an earlier investigation into alleged crime statistics manipulation. Pulliam, who denies the allegations, now faces termination after the new report. He declined to comment Thursday.
D.C. police policy says that supervisors, while responsible for ensuring the accuracy of classifications, are not permitted to make changes to how offenses are categorized in other officers’ reports.
The report cites several other captains for improperly editing reports but concludes they did not engage in a pattern of intentional misconduct. The editing appeared to be a common practice among the captains examined, who in many cases said they believed the initial decisions were incorrect and that modifying the reports fulfilled their duty to ensure accuracy. Pamela Keith, an attorney for an accused captain, told The Post that she believes some captains are being punished for editing reports in a way that happened frequently across the department.
In other cases, allegations of misconduct were unsubstantiated — including one against Carroll, now the interim police chief.
An assistant chief claimed Carroll erred last year when he advised against classifying a traffic fatality as a homicide. In an interview with investigators, Carroll said the choice was in line with typical department practices and one he reached after 10 years of experience dealing with such fatalities. Investigators agreed with Carroll and said there was no evidence that misconduct occurred.
Carroll was not in charge of the D.C. police force for the period of time examined in the report. His predecessor, Pamela A. Smith, took the helm of the department during the summer of 2023, as the city was in the middle of a historic crime spike and residents from all corners were asking leaders to do something about it.
Like the two federal investigations before it, the D.C. police internal probe did not find evidence that Smith improperly directed anyone to change crime classifications. Still, she loomed large in the investigation, as current and former staff reported seeing her berate her command staff at meetings over crime levels in their districts.
A former detective recalled watching the chief chastise a commander who failed to stand to answer one of her questions in a meeting, according to the report. A captain said her public denigrations of command staff at briefings were difficult to isolate into specific examples because they had become so expected. Another told investigators the pressure on officials was so intense he worried it would cause people to hurt themselves.
The former chief had some defenders, who said they did not think she was overly harsh, according to the report. One also pointed out that as the first Black woman to lead the police department, she faced extra pressure from inside and outside the agency.
Smith declined to participate in the internal affairs investigation, the report states. She also did not return multiple phone calls from The Post requesting comment.
In a fiery December speech on her final day as chief, she said she forgave her “haters” and would never compromise her integrity over crime data.
Investigators said the chief’s impact “cannot be overlooked” in the analysis of how crimes were classified, even if evidence showed she did not direct any underreporting. They said her “leadership and treatment of those under her command had a drastic and negative effect on the MPD and negatively influenced the culture of the agency she oversaw.”
Still, the probe ultimately concludes that commanders were responsible for their own behavior — noting that a majority had resisted alleged pressure to under-classify crimes.
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The report does criticize one other person within Smith’s inner circle — assistant chief Andre Wright, whom she promoted to oversee all patrol operations in the department.
Investigators said that while there was no evidence that Wright “specifically directed the misclassification of crimes on a large scale, the pattern of conduct uncovered certainly indicates that he was aware of, and supported, the practice.”
They said messages found on Wright’s department-issued cellphone show him advising his wife, an inspector in the department, to change some property crimes to other offenses to lower statistics in her area.
In one message last year, the report says, he told his wife to ask a captain in the department about the classification “taking property without right,” a category investigators found was frequently abused to lower the number of reported thefts.
Less than an hour later, he messaged again: “Did you reclassify that theft?”
Both Wright and his wife maintained to investigators that the texts were not part of a scheme to misrepresent crime. Wright said he offered his wife counsel as he would any other colleague and was not directing her to classify crimes in any particular way. But investigators allege that Wright’s advice “was clearly intended to advise and support her misclassification decisions.”
Wright was put on leave in March after sexually charged texts to his wife were found on his work phone during the crime statistics investigation. That matter is also under review. Reached by phone Thursday, he declined to comment on the investigation. His wife did not respond to a request for comment.
Every accused official will have the opportunity to defend themselves through the police disciplinary process, which can drag on for years in some cases. Historically, it has been difficult for D.C. police chiefs to successfully fire officers — though the D.C. Council has in recent years passed laws to ease the process.
At a news conference Tuesday, Carroll said the department was well on its way to implementing the policy recommendations in the report, which include educating employees on acceptable revisions to classifications and implementing a system of independent review for police reports.
In the meantime, other probes continue.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky) has demanded that D.C. police hand over its investigation and other materials. Carroll reiterated Tuesday that the department never releases its internal probes.
The city’s inspector general is also expected to release a report of its own investigation. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said at an unrelated event Wednesday that she had been briefed on its findings.
Bowser, who through a spokesperson declined to comment on the internal affairs report, has previously said she did not believe classification issues at her police department were widespread. Asked by an NBC Washington reporter whether she felt she had been lied to, the mayor didn’t answer the question directly.
“What I know is that we have been trying to get at all of the information for months,” she replied, “and I think we have one piece of the puzzle.”
Steve Thompson and Emily Davies contributed to this report.
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