On Monday, August 11, President Trump spawned a major media fact check frenzy when he announced the federalization of DC police. The Washington Post, NYT, AP, CNN, NBC, etc. all reported that crime in DC is down dramatically to challenge Trump’s rationale for imposing a police state on the nation’s capital.
The only problem with these media reports is that their news source was the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), whose crime statistics are suspect. MPD’s numbers have been challenged not only by the White House, but also by DC Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton and crime data expert Jeff Asher.
In a recent blog post Asher reported that “the FBI’s data shows a 9 percent drop while MPDC’s public data shows a 35 percent drop [in violent crime between 2023 and 2024]“.
The FBI’s publicly available Data Discovery tool not only corroborates Asher’s information, it also shows that Arlington County’s violent crime rate went up 11% during the same period.
Come again? How can the crime rate in an affluent suburban county escalate while the crime rate in the city next door plummets?
There are only two possible explanations. Either Arlington County police (ACPD) are asleep at the switch or DC police excel at creative writing.
I’ll leave it for you to decide. In the meantime, if elected, I’m going to plug for filling over 100 vacancies among ACPD’s uniformed officers.
Finally, I have no issue with my opponent Takis Karantonis’ opposition to deploying Arlington police officers to help Trump pacify DC streets, as part of a mutual aid agreement with the District of Columbia.
If what I read in the major media is to be believed, Arlington’s finest are needed on this side of the river, not in DC.