Washington DC police fake violent crime reports

Amid the cacophony in the national mainstream press protesting the use of National Guard troops to keep the peace in crime-ridden Washington DC and the loud additional protestations that violent crime has actually dropped there for 2025, reports have surfaced of the arrest of a DC police commander for altering violent crime records.¹,² Admittedly, since this arrest doesn’t fit the major national press narrative that President Trump’s use of the National Guard is unjustified and just another power grab by the President, the report of the arrest of Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department Commander Michael Pulliam in July, is hard to find.

It seems that Commander Pulliam has participated in what the police union called a program of “deliberately falsifying crime data” to “manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year.”³ Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton claims that it is common MPD practice for violent crimes to be recorded as lesser, non-violent or less serious crimes. Pemberton said, the “union has been gathering evidence (of the practice) for some time now by looking at reports and talking with officers all over the city.”⁴

Justifying his use of the National Guard in Washington DC, President Trump’s White House website cites the following actual statistics among many others:

• In 2024, Washington, D.C. saw a homicide rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents. That was the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country — nearly six times higher than New York City and also higher than Atlanta, Chicago, and Compton.

• If Washington, D.C. was a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation. In 2012, the homicide rate in Washington, D.C. was just 13.9 per 100,000 residents.

• So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 1,600 violent crimes and nearly 16,000 total crimes reported in Washington, D.C.

• There have been nearly 100 homicides, including the fatal shootings of innocent civilians like three-year-old Honesty Cheadle and 21-year-old Capitol Hill intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym.

• Vehicle theft in Washington, D.C. is more than three times the national average — ranking it among the most dangerous cities in the world.⁵

Since the deployment of the National Guard in DC, nine days have passed without a homicide. In the previous six months of 2025 Washington averaged a homicide about every two days.⁶ But the deployment of the National Guard is only a temporary measure. It appears that a more drastic systemic change must take place in the city of Washington DC justice regime. The MPD statistics record that 77% percent of all DC homicides involve the use of a gun \. But over the period from 2018 to 2022 (the most recent complete records), of the 5,558 arrests made with a citations for carrying an unlicensed gun only 98 received prison sentences for the crime.⁷ Evidently the Washington DC justice authorities just do not consider carrying an unlicensed firearm, even when committing a crime, a serious problem.

We here at I Vote My Vote applaud the serious efforts by President Trump and other government authorities to curtail the epidemic of crime in the US. If the use of the National Guard is required to do this then we support it. But we look forward to educated and sincere efforts by police and government to change the kind of lax view of crime as currently evidenced in our large cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington DC.

To understand the problem with laxity towards crime in our citiesand the trajectory of the problem, review the following I Vote My Vote blog:

• “Representative Bush wants to defund the police but fund her husband“ Posted 02/08/2024.

• “Crime in America’s Big Cities: A Cancer We Can Treat—If We Follow the Evidence” Posted 08/21/2025

• “Crime: America’s Cancer That Demands a Specialist” Posted 08/31/25