The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report yesterday titled “Leadership Breakdown: How D.C.’s Police Chief Undermined Crime Data Accuracy.” The interim report accuses Chief Pamela Smith of pressuring staff to manipulate crimes stats. It’s based on interviews with 8 MPD commanders. This is from the executive summary of the new report:
The Committee’s ongoing investigation has heard testimonies from commanders that there are clear pressures placed on MPD personnel to lower the classifications of crime to present to the public the perception of low crime in the District. Specifically, there was an emphasis on the daily crime report (DCR), a public-facing dataset that only includes nine categories of felony offenses, above all other crimes discussed within the highest levels of the MPD. Chief Smith, the commanders testified, was so preoccupied with the statistics of the select crimes that were made public that she incentivized her subordinates to lower those crimes by whatever means necessary.
MPD commanders’ testimonies corroborated concerns about alleged manipulations of crime statistics. In fact, commanders told the Committee that, on numerous occasions, they were not only pressured, but also instructed, to lower crime classifications to lesser intermediate offenses in such a way that those offenses would not be included in the DCR reported to the public.
This whole investigation began after President Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington, DC. The instant response from many on the left was to claim that crime had already dropped sharply in DC. But there were tips suggesting those figures may have been manipulated from the top down:
The Committee, in its broad jurisdiction over the District, launched its investigation after receiving reports from reliable sources that senior officials at the MPD were deliberately lowering crime statistics prior to the President’s federal surge. Critics of the President’s surge had used crime statistics that claimed lower crime levels to argue that the surge was misguided.
But the interviews with the commanders backed up the idea that Chief Smith was more focused on the stats than on the reality of crime.
The Committee heard testimony about deeply troubling priorities within the MPD: Chief Smith generally prioritized lowering the reportable public crime statistics over lowering actual crime levels on the streets of the District to such an extent that she placed an inordinate amount of pressure on district commanders to deliver low crime numbers by any means necessary. Commanders testified they regularly expected to be berated and embarrassed by Chief Smith in mandatory crime briefings if they brought news of an increase in reported crime numbers. Commanders also noted they believed their positions and livelihoods were dependent on reporting low crime numbers to Chief Smith. Various commanders testified to observing several of their fellow commanders being removed or demoted immediately following a negative crime report.
Chief Smith created expectations that many of the crimes specifically affecting public crime statistics upon their entry into MPD systems had to be reviewed by her and her assistant chiefs prior to their inclusion. The commanders further testified to the Committee that Chief Smith, unlike other chiefs before her, instituted a push for the more frequent use of intermediate criminal charges. Intermediate charges are lower degree criminal charges that go unreported to the public by MPD, as opposed to more serious charges that have been included in the publicly reported statistics.35 These combined efforts, as explained by commanders, amounted to manipulating MPD crime statistics in an effort to show lowered rates of crime to the public.
How this worked in practice, according to the report, is that Commanders were expected to report any crime that could show up in the stats to their superiors. Those superiors were then expected to report to Chief Smith prior to them being classified in the system. And word would then sometimes come down from the chief that a certain crime should be reclassified as something that would not show up in the crime stats.
Commander A remarked this process could lead to directions from Chief Smith to her executive assistant chiefs, and, subsequently to the commanders, that certain classifications need to be changed.46 Commander A, in describing one of those instances, explained they were instructed to reduce an assault with a dangerous weapon (ADW) offense to an endangerment with a firearm offense—in other words, from a crime that is reported to the public to one that is not.
Commander A: During one of those instances… he called about an ADW, assault with a dangerous weapon, for shooting where nobody was hit, I briefed out my patrol chief. He called the executive assistant chief. And when he called me back, he said, Well, it sounds like you have an endangerment with a firearm. And I said, Well, are you asking me or telling me, because I briefed you on what I had? And when I said that… he responded, [an Executive Assistant Chief] says, You have an endangerment with a firearm. I said, Okay. So that was the classification.
Another Commander testified the same thing was happening with burglaries in his division:
Commander B: When I first took over the district, I would see a call come in for a burglary and then I would look on my watch commander report, and I would see that it was classified as an unlawful entry and a theft. It piqued my interest. I’d go read the report, and it would read like a burglary. It would say so and so came home after a day out and found their door open and their TV missing from their wall. That’s the elements of a burglary. Is it also an unlawful entry and a theft? Technically. But the proper charge would be burglary, but unlawful entry doesn’t hit the DCR status of burglary. So maybe my burglaries are down now even though I had a ton of unlawful entries.
Why did the commanders go along with this? Because they quickly learned that anyone who didn’t would be dressed down in front of the other chiefs and on some occasions there were demotions that followed.
Commander B: Chief Darnel Robinson was promoted to chief, assistant chief…He was very vocal about standing up for what he believed was right. And one morning, we all sat in the crime briefing and waited and waited and waited, it never started…
About 30 minutes later him and Chief Smith came into the crime briefing, the very next day he was transferred to the Technical and Analytical Services Bureau, which is a fancy word for IT. So he’s now the commander of IT…
He was the former 6D commander. One of the most respected people in the police department. So I’ll put it at that.
There’s more but you can read the whole 22-page report by following this link.
Not coincidentally, Chief Smith resigned her position last week. Ironically, the Washington Post and the Mayor praised her success in bringing down crime.
D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith is resigning from her position leading the force after two years on the job marked by a steep drop in crime and escalating federal interference in the District’s policing and public safety system.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) posted a statement online praising Smith’s service while “navigating unprecedented challenges and attacks on our city’s autonomy.”
“Chief Smith dramatically drove down violent crime, drove down the homicide rate to its lowest levels in eight years, and helped us restore a sense of safety and accountability in our neighborhoods,” Bowser added…
In an interview with Fox5 on Monday morning, Smith said she resigned to spend more time with her family. “After 28 years in law enforcement,” she said, “I have been going nonstop.”
I suspect Chief Smith knew her Commanders were being interviewed and knew what some of them were going to say. She decided to leave before she was asked. As for bringing down crime, it’s not clear she did that. It sounds as if she mostly reclassified things so they wouldn’t appear in crime reports, which isn’t the same thing.
What did actually bring down crime in DC was Trump’s surge of resources.
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