Following President Trump’s declaration of a crime emergency in the nation’s capital on Monday, mainstream media outlets immediately pushed back claiming that crime rates in Washington, D.C. have fallen considerably in recent years. But a pattern of inaccurate reporting of crime data and a full analysis of the statistics paint a different picture of how safe the streets of America’s capital actually are.

Over the last several months, a string of brazen murders in the heart of D.C. have shocked residents. In May, a young Jewish couple who worked for the Israeli Embassy were brutally gunned down by a pro-Palestine activist as they exited an evening event at the Capital Jewish Museum, just blocks away from the U.S. Capitol. Two months later, a 21-year-old intern who served in the office of Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.) was shot and killed outside the Mount Vernon Square metro station when individuals emerged from a vehicle and opened fire on a group of people.

Another troubling pattern that has continued unabated in recent years is high numbers of carjackings, many of which have been carried out by roving groups of teenage minors. Last week, 19-year-old former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine was severely beaten by two 15-year-olds who were attempting to steal Coristine’s car, which observers say likely played a part in Trump’s decision to put the capital’s police force under federal control. The president’s fact sheet pointed out that D.C.’s vehicle theft rate is 842.4 thefts per 100,000 residents, over three times the national average.

Still, media outlets quickly cited police data showing that violent crime had decreased by 35% from 2023 to 2024. But as The Daily Caller reported, “D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) only includes homicide, sex abuse crimes, assault with a dangerous weapon and robbery in its overall ‘violent crime’ numbers that show a decline in 2024. Aggravated assault and felony assault without the use of weapons are left out, despite D.C. law describing them as violent offenses causing bodily injury and despite the fact that aggravated assaults are increasing, according to the FBI.”

According to FBI numbers, the level of violent crime in the nation’s capital remains higher than pre-COVID pandemic levels. Homicides have remained higher for the last three straight years, and aggravated assaults with or without a weapon were 12% higher in 2024 than in 2023 and 37% higher than in 2022.

In addition, violent crime numbers were underreported during the Biden administration. Last October, it was discovered that the FBI revised its numbers to show a 4.5% increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022, which they initially reported as a 2.1% decrease. Then, in July, a D.C. police commander was suspended after it was discovered that he had deliberately falsified crime data by downgrading violent crime reports to lesser offenses.

Experts like Dr. John Lott, who serves as president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, say that “it’s not rocket science” to figure out the reasons behind the continued high rates of violent crime in the nation’s capital.

“Basically, if you want to deter crime, you have to make it risky for criminals to go and commit crime,” he observed during “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “And that means higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences, allowing victims to be able to go and defend themselves. Washington, D.C. [has] 1,300 patrol officers. You have at most 400 or so on duty at any point in time. For a city of 720,000 people, that’s a lot of ground to cover. The police union head has said their officers are stretched very thin. It’s hard for them to do what they need to do. Plus, there’s all sorts of restrictions that the city has put on them, making it more difficult for them to go and do their jobs.”

As Lott went on to describe, another contributing factor to spiraling crime is the significant lack of prosecution and conviction rates.

“The U.S. attorney … under Biden in 2022… refused to press charges in 67% of the arrests that were made,” he noted. “In 2023, it was slightly better, but he still refused to press charges in 55% of the arrests that were made. That’s not making [crime] very risky. … [A] lot of the crime has been committed by juveniles, in part because [of] how they are treated differently in the system there, and you have situations where juveniles are being let off — even when they get convicted, [they are] not facing any real punishments at all.”

Lott further detailed how crime statistics are being distorted by discrepancies in reporting.

“[W]e have two different measures of crime — we have crimes reported to police, and then we have from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a measure of total crimes reported and unreported,” he explained. “And that’s from a really massive 240,000-person survey that the Bureau of Justice Statistics does each year, and they’ve been doing this for over 50 years. It’s basically because of that data that we know only about 40% of violent crimes are reported to police, and only about 30% of property crimes are reported to police.”

Lott continued, “[T]here are multiple reasons for why you have that gap that’s occurring. One thing that’s happened [is that] whether people report crimes to the police depends in part on whether they think the criminal is going to be caught and punished. If people don’t think that the criminals are going to be caught at very high rates, they’re less likely to go and report that information to the police. … [A]nother example … [is that] six years ago, if you called the police, they would send out a police car to take the report. Now [if you say] the criminal isn’t there, [they tell you to] come down to the police station and fill out a police report that’s here and wait in line while you do that.”