The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit filed by a former Metropolitan Police Department sergeant who accused department leaders of deliberately misclassifying crimes to manipulate the city’s crime statistics.

The settlement, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, raises questions about the authenticity of crime data previously reported by city officials. The level of lawlessness in the city has been widely debated since President Trump ordered federal forces to help police its streets.

Charlotte Djossou, who served in Iraq before joining the D.C. police force, filed the lawsuit in 2020, alleging that MPD leaders pressured officers to downgrade offenses, such as theft, knife attacks, and violent assaults, to less severe classifications. According to court documents obtained by the Beacon, the alleged practice was an effort to produce “fewer” felonies in public crime reports.

“Commanders of the district, or the captains of the district, who can show crime reduction are promoted, so they would downgrade felonies or just downgrade crimes in order to make the crime look like it’s less than what it is,” she said in a 2022 interview with USA Today. “They’re asking officers and sergeants to underreport crimes.”

On August 5, the same day President Trump first threatened a federal takeover of the MPD, a judge dismissed Ms. Djossou’s case at the request of both parties. The case had been scheduled to go to trial in June but was delayed during negotiations that ended when the two parties “reached a settlement in principle,” the Beacon reported.

In her lawsuit, Ms. Djossou claimed that she was punished for speaking out against the directive to downgrade reports, accusing MPD leadership of attempting to distort crime statistics. She reported the practice to MPD’s internal affairs office in 2019, prompting an investigation. The department’s internal report, included in court records, contained interviews with multiple officers who corroborated the claims of intentional charge downgrades.  

When Mr. Trump this week announced he was activating the National Guard to assist in law enforcement in the district and taking over the MPD, numerous mainstream media outlets cited FBI statistics indicating that crime in the district has come down from the high levels reported during the Covid pandemic. “Fact check: Violent crime in DC has fallen in 2024 and 2025 after a 2023 spike,” CNN said.

The city’s Democrat leaders say their policies are working. In 2024, officials claimed violent crime had dropped 35 percent from the year before to the lowest level in 30 years. In July, city officials touted another 25 percent decline so far this year. 

But just last month, an MPD commander, Michael Pulliam of the Third District, was suspended amid allegations that he falsified crime data. The police union has charged that MPD command staff explicitly instruct officers to reclassify felonies as lesser offenses. 

The police union chairman, Gregg Pemberton, has described how shootings, stabbings, and carjackings are recorded as thefts, injured person calls, or nebulous “felony assaults” that are not standard categories in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting. 

“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Mr. Pemberton told Washington’s NBC-4 last month.

“So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”

“When management officials are directing officers to take reports for felony assault, or if they’re going back into police databases and changing offenses to felony assault, felony assault is not a category of crime that’s listed on the department’s daily crime stats,” Mr. Pemberton said.

“It’s also not something that’s a requirement of the FBI’s uniform crime reporting program. So, by changing criminal offenses from, for example, ADW [assault with a deadly weapon] bat or ADW gun to felony assault, that would avoid both the MPD and the FBI from reporting that as a part one or a felony offense.”

The White House said this week that crime has not abated in the city. “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 were 29,348 crimes reported in Washington, D.C. last year, including 3,469 violent offenses, 1,026 assaults with a dangerous weapon, 2,113 robberies, and 5,139 motor vehicle thefts,” the White House said in a press release.

“Washington, D.C.’s murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba,” the release said. “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.”