Anyone who has set foot in Washington, D.C., in the last few years knows that the place just feels dangerous. Homeless people crowd nearly every downtown sidewalk, and their encampments are set up all over the city. The stench of urine and cannabis hangs in the air, and visitors and residents alike are sometimes leery of walking anywhere after dark.

But to hear the mainstream press talk about it, the nation’s capital is safer than South Burlington, Vermont (routinely dubbed the safest city in America).

After President Trump this week announced that he was taking over the Metropolitan Police Department and deploying the National Guard to curb the crime, some in the press went into overdrive defending the district.

“Fact check: Violent crime in DC has fallen in 2024 and 2025 after a 2023 spike,” CNN said. “Trump doesn’t have the data to back up his claims about Washington, D.C.,” MSNBC wrote. “Trump Distorts Violent Crime Statistics in Ordering Takeover and Troops to D.C.,” FactCheck.org declared. The Associated Press went even further, declaring in one headline, “Trump’s Rhetoric About DC Echoes a History of Racist Narratives About Urban Crime.”

The city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, bristled when informed by Mr. Trump that he was now in charge. In interview after interview, she said the Metropolitan Police Department has driven violent crime to a 30-year low, claiming it has dropped by 26 percent so far in 2025.

“It is true we had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023, this is 2025,” Ms. Bowser said in one interview. “We’ve done that by working with the community, working with the police, working with our prosecutors, and, in fact, working with the federal government.”

But the books are cooked, according to the Fraternal Order of Police chairman, Gregg Pemberton. 

“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 NBC-4 in Washington 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 NBC report also said that a D.C. police commander is under investigation for allegedly making changes to crime statistics in his district. The MPD confirmed that Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May, a week after he filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union, accusing the department of falsifying crime data.

“What we’ve heard through our members and through members of management that were willing to talk with the union is that this is a directive from the command staff, is that they want to make sure that these classifications of these reports are adjusted over time to make sure that the overall crime stats stay down,” Mr. Pemberton said. “And this is deliberately done.”

The MPD data show 552 fewer victims of violent crime so far this year, with decreases coming across all seven police districts. But crime numbers compiled by the White House differ greatly from what city officials claim.

“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.”

Unlike the mayor and Democrats on Capitol Hill, the D.C. police union, which Mr. Pemberton heads, wholeheartedly supported the federal takeover.

“The DC Police Union, representing over 3,000 officers of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), today acknowledges and supports the President’s announcement this morning to assume temporary control of the MPD in response to the escalating crime crisis in Washington, D.C. The Union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety,” the group said in a statement.