Here’s a smoking gun: Records uncovered in the recently settled lawsuit by police sergeant Charlotte Djossou showed that D.C. police department leadership ordered the staff to file theft and violent crimes as lower-level offenses.

The sergeant accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics. Police superiors told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, as shown by internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts.

Djossou’s suit was filed in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. She accused MPD brass of deliberately to “distort[ing] crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records proving that police leaders instructed their subordinates to under-classify varieties of theft to keep the crime statistics artificially low.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico all used data from the Metropolitan Police Department to argue that the District is as crime-free as Oz and that Trump’s takeover is really just an early stage of his dictator aspirations. Did their coverage mention Djossou’ s suit? Naw. Did they disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats? Of course not. Can the public trust the mainstream media to fairly report on any initiative by the Trump Administration? Can the public trust any politicized institution to tell the truth about their effectiveness?

There are more details here.

If we can’t trust the statistics to be honest and true, then all the indignant claims about crime rates dropping are unreliable. That alone is justification for a federal takeover of the D.C. law enforcement operation.