Serious crimes are being deliberately and dishonestly downgraded to keep them from public view and understate the severity of the crime problem in the Nation’s Capital – due to the orders and coercion tactics of Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Police Chief Pamela A. Smith – a House Oversight Committee report released Sunday reveals.
“During Smith’s time as Chief of Police, the Committee was made aware of allegations that senior MPD officials are deliberately falsifying publicly reported crime data to artificially lower public-facing crime rates in the District,” according to “Leadership Breakdown: How D.C.’s Police Chief Undermined Crime Data Accuracy,” an interim report presenting the results of transcribed interviews with eight MPD commanders under Smith’s authority.
Since Smith took office in July of 2023, the commanders say, there have been clear “pressures placed on MPD personnel to lower the classifications of crime to present to the public the perception of low crime in the District”:
“Specifically, there was an emphasis on the daily crime report (DCR), a public-facing dataset that only includes nine categories of felony offenses.”
As a result, downgrading serious crimes to intermediate offenses that aren’t reported understates and hides the true severity of crime in D.C.
Examples of ways they were forced to downgrade offenses to prevent them from being reported provided by the commanders include:
- Being instructed to reduce “assault with a dangerous weapon” to “endangerment with a firearm” because the victim was not actually hit with the bullet fired.
- Categorizing an obvious burglary as “unlawful entry and a theft,” in order to avoid inclusion in the crime count publicly reported.
Chief Smith’s orders and coercion to downgrade the classification of crimes reportedly intensified in August when President Donald Trump declared a crime emergency in the Nation’s Capital and deployed a surge of federal law enforcement to protect its residents, prompting the Committee’s investigation:
“The Committee, in its broad jurisdiction over the District, launched its investigation after receiving reports from reliable sources that senior officials at the MPD were deliberately lowering crime statistics prior to the President’s federal surge. Critics of the President’s surge had used crime statistics that claimed lower crime levels to argue that the surge was misguided.”
As an example of Chief Smith’s disdain for the truth, testimony quoted her commenting on a commander under her authority:
“I would rather him make something up than tell me that.”
When subordinates refused to dishonestly manipulate crime statistics to her liking, Chief Smith would punish them, creating a culture of fear, intimidation, threats, and retaliation, the commanders told the Committee:
“The Committee heard testimony from commanders that Chief Smith engaged in retribution in the form of retaliatory transfers and demotions against various MPD officials.
“According to multiple commanders, Chief Smith either threatened to take or took action to remove or transfer MPD personnel who did not present her with favorable crime statistics or who—in Chief Smith’s judgement—questioned her actions.”
While Smith is scheduled to resign on December 31, the report concludes that she needs to be dismissed immediately to ensure the manipulation of statistics and retaliation against honest subordinates doesn’t continue:
“Crime classifications—which affect reported MPD crime data—have been and are still at risk of being artificially reduced to manipulate crime statistics at the expense of public safety even after Chief Smith’s resignation.”
