The Trump Justice Department is investigating whether Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department manipulated crime knowledge, in keeping with two sources.
The investigation, which is being run by the US legal professional’s workplace in DC, is an escalation within the metropolis’s battle towards a federal regulation enforcement takeover from the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump appeared to substantiate the probe in a social media post, writing that “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety. This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!”
The Justice Department declined to touch upon the investigation. NCS has reached out to Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Metropolitan Police Department for remark.
The investigation comes following reports that an MPD commander was positioned on administrative go away amid accusations that the division was falsifying crime knowledge in a single district, marking offenses as lower-level crimes than they could really be.
Trump and different administration officers have for months slammed the capital metropolis, alleging that its Democratic management has allowed violent crime to run rampant for years. When federal police descended simply over every week in the past, the president mentioned it was essential to fight what he mentioned was skyrocketing crime charges.
City officers have pushed again on the allegation, and the MPD’s public statistics say that violent crime has dropped virtually 30% from this time final yr. And in January the DOJ said that in 2024, violent crime dropped 35 % from the earlier yr, marking the bottom it had been in additional than three many years.