Jeff, as you say, you're a "keyboard jockey sitting in New Orleans." You have your niche and you're doing a great job within it. But I'm in Washington, D.C. and your analysis seems bloodless and out-of-context.
This is what Trump said about DC: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.... Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They're on ATVs, motorbikes, they travel pretty well..... Today, we're formally declaring a public safety emergency. This is an emergency. This is a tragic emergency and it's embarrassing for me to be up here."
Only the last eight words are true. As you know, DC's violent crime rate was lower in 2024 than any time in the past 30+ years. Whatever the nitpicking, our violent crime rate is now lower in 2025 than in 2024. There are no roving gangs, mobs, maniacs, or mass youth rampage, and no emergency. This is all a big lie, which is a well-known tactic, literally from the fascist handbook.
We now have mobs of federal police and national guardsmen roaming our streets, not knowing what they are doing. This is a disgrace to America; our foreign allies are appalled and our enemies are laughing at us. I hope it never happens in New Orleans, but I think this is a test-run and you will be subjected to the same sooner or later.
So, maybe your columns could start with the overall truth before you get to your detailed data?
1) I think the News Media is being dishonest in its reporting re Washington DC. If you live in Northwest DC (Wards 1-3) then things may be peachy keen. Life is much different in Wards 8 and 7 south of the Anacostia River. But those people are poor so beneath the notice of the Washington Post and NY Times.
Note the MUCH higher number of homicides recently: 2022: 80 ; 2023: 98 ; 2024: 66
The same is true in Ward 7: 2013: 23 homicides 2014: 28
2022: 47 2023: 56 2024: 45
3) In my opinion, the News Media’s loud claim that violence has been falling in the past 30 years is an example of lying with statistics. Concealing things by diluting the homicides in Ward 7 and 8 with much larger population of the city as a whole.
4) Ward 8 population is 87,043. Using the usual measure of homicides per 100,000 , Ward 8’s homicide rate was 113 per 100,000 in 2023 and 76 in 2024.
5) The homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000 (FBI UCR 2024). In Mexico City it is 11 per 100,000. In Iraq it is 6 per 100,000. In Pakistan it is 4 per 100,000.
6) Our loyalty should be to our fellow Americans --especially to those most likely to be with our sons in the foxholes of the next war – and not to political parties. I say that as a registered Democrat who worked as a volunteer in Howard Dean and Barack Obama's Presidential campaigns and in the campaigns of several Democratic candidates for Congress.
And instead of defending the overall truth you would rather blanket this in hatred for the president with a longwinded and rather incorrect diatribe? As a person that isn’t a keyboard jockey, a person that lived this as a street cop - become more objective and take the politics out of your equation. Come out from behind your white picket fence and into the real deal. You may wind up agreeing with Trump after you see how muddied the water are in the world of Criminal Statistic gathering.
So your crime is lower now than last year when it was still a higher incidence t of crime? Do you understand what CompStat is? I suggest that you read up on that and the improprieties in the NYPD with that and you’ll see that numbers with downward trends with no specific conditions set forth by law enforcement should be handled with suspicion.
Agreed but let’s take one more step and ask ourselves if any rational adult in DC actually believes that Trump has our best interests at heart and that this isn’t just another colossal distraction from his failure/refusal to release the Epstein files. American civil liberties are taking a huge step backwards to obfuscate the sex crimes of some wealthy old men.
Please. Refresh your tin foil hat. Biden was in office for four years. Trump, from the moment he declared his candidacy to run again was persecuted, arrested, prosecuted, and even an attempted assassination on his life, not once but twice. Multiple outdated redundant misdemeanors stacked up that writhing the NYS PL mandated that such an amount of misdemeanors created felonies, without any victims would be enough to get him off the ballot. Combined with states trying to remove him from the ballot, and failing. Don’t you think a simple release of such files would have been authorized by Bidens DoJ? That even today an Obama judge is the one stating these files can’t be released - if Trump was mentioned even in one sentence that wouldn’t have already been written exposed? You’re throwing the proverbial spaghetti to see where it sticks, again. Move on from the nonsense. It’s a nothing burger and you’re sitting on the wrong side of history. DC is now ground zero for suppressing violent crime. Those that protest about it are obviously not residents of DC, or they are white libs that stand in false pretense so that crime doesn’t come to their suburban towns in Maryland and Virginia. You make a comment about sex crimes by old white men being obfuscated. Yet you ignore the fact that young black men’s lives are endangered by other young black men. But obviously it’s a play out of the left’s strategical play book. Go after the contrasting ideology without caring about the very people you want to champion - because you really don’t.
Even if that data is tainted? Turning burglaries into trespass, grand theft auto into joyriding, felony assaults into misdemeanors, attempted murders into Assaults, robberies into larcenies…did you even add to the fact that a metro DC commander has been suspended for cooking the books on stats? This is a practice that goes back to 1994 in the NYPD - I know first hand because I lived it, and I complained about it.
Nationwide data shows that both Violent and Property Crime are down dramatically all across The Land of The (used to be) Free.
Is it your contention is that somehow, some way, the "metro DC" cops have figured out how to cook the books on ALL of the crime data/analyses from the FBI, BJS, CDC, Gun Violence Archive, Pew Research, Johns Hopkins, Brennan Center, Jeff-Alytics, ad Nauseam…? An impressive feat, that.
Like you, I don't have the data to comment on data manipulation, but I would like to focus on the serious problem with insinuating “reported” crime is the same thing as total crime which includes "unreported" crime. The result is that people from poor and fringe neighborhoods are being abused daily and living in totally intolerable conditions while the analyst and media mistakenly insinuate total crime is going down. The only three crimes where reported crime may have some correlation to actual numbers are murder, carjackings, and shootings where a bullet hole in a human being forces the victim to seek medical attention. These crimes are usually reported for obvious reasons.
Something totally unprecedented has occurred in poor and fringe neighborhoods over the last 4 years, something you formerly only saw in third world countries. Virtually, nobody will report theft, robbery, assault, harassment, physical threats, or display of or firing a gun because:
1. Laws have changed making drug possession, use, and distribution legal.
2. It is now a non-prosecutable misdemeanor or less to steal up to $1,000 or $1,500 a day in over half the states and $2,500 a day in some states.
3. It is now a non-prosecutable misdemeanor to empty the shelves of local stores multiple times.
4. It is now a non-prosecutable crime to mug, rob, beat, and assault people on the street or public transportation because they are always plead down to misdemeanor or no-crime.
5. Police have been neutered, and can no longer stop, search, chase or arrest suspected criminals.
6. Police have been demonized to the point where no sane person would ever aspire to be a cop.
7. Police have been defunded to the point where there is no proactive crime deterrence.
8. Police response times have risen from 30 minutes or less to 4 or 5 hours.
9. Police are powerless to stop retaliation against victims or witnesses who report crimes.
10. Cashless bail puts the criminal back at the victim's or witness's door the same day as the crime.
11. Arrests have dropped through the floor, and not because crime has decreased.
12. Soft-on-crime prosecutors reduce felonies to misdemeanors or no-crimes in the vast majority of cases.
13. Prosecutions have dropped through the floor. Every arrest but the most serious of crimes is pled down to no consequence.
14. In the unlikely event of both an arrest, and a prosecution, the possibility of any serious consequence for committing a crime is virtually zero.
15. And last but probably most important retaliation by the criminal or his gang makes it impossible for any victim or witness to ever appear in court.
Because of the above, justifiably no sane victim or witness will report a crime anymore. The result is “Unreported” crime which 4 years ago was estimated at 60% of “reported” crime, is now many times larger than “reported” crime. “Reported” and “unreported crime are now inversely correlated. No one can disagree that the above 15 items have and are occurring and that they discourage reporting of crime.
Evidence: take a look at your violent shooting rates for Chicago. But ShotSpotter records 360,000 shots fired annually, each discharge of a weapon in the city is a felony, not counting a citizen threatened, mugged, assaulted, or robbed, none of which is ever reported. Every time I am in a drug store or food store or big box store there are tons of folks picking up merchandise and walking out. Store personnel are told to not intervene. In Cook County you can now steal $999 eight times, and it’s OK. Nobody reports this. Have you adjusted the FBI "reported crime" stats to compensate for this? Please stop saying crime is down until you get a handle on "Unreported Crime”. I have hundreds of family and friends living in daily fear in these neighborhoods and it really destroys them when they hear crime is down, when its totally out of control in the neighborhoods of our most defenseless. At the very least, there should be a footnote on all crime reports (other than murder, car jackings, and shootings requiring medical attention) that this data only represents “reported crime”, and it is estimated that “unreported crime” could easily exceed “reported crime” by many times.
I concur with your take, Jeff. There's some noise, but it's coming from reporting by MPDC. It's not as if the NIBRS reporting is the result of independent counting or auditing from the FBI. I might, given some of the complexity in NIBRS reporting, actually put more weight on the department public reporting as most accurate if not entirely matching. What do you think the role of NIBRS is here in inherently raising the number of reported crimes? The traditional UCR model was hierarchical, report the most serious offence involved. NIBRS captures multiple offences in a single incident. I've seen estimates that it accounts for a low percentage of increase but that resounds differently to an analyst and a law enforcement chief executive.
I've spent convivial hours in the bar at both the old and new FOP lodge in DC. Lodge 1, in fact. folks are convinced that there is motivation by the brass to cook the books downward, I would note there is motivation by the union to got the other way a bit. The FOP endorses for President based on the vote of the Lodge members and has endorsed POTUS. I'm not seeing a chef in the data Jeff has published and analyzed
It's not that your stats are right or wrong - and I believe they are correct. It's the Trump angle that Dems are up in arms about. Don't believe me? The Democrat Governor of New Mexico activated the NM National Guard in April 2025 to patrol the streets of Albuquerque without controversy.
Hi Jeff: BJS recently offered "Only 38 Percent of Urban Crimes Are Reported To Law Enforcement."
The 38% figure comes from a BJS report titled “Reporting to Police by Type of Crime and Location of Residence, 2020–2023″. The report breaks down reporting rates by area type:
Urban areas: approximately 38% of violent victimizations were reported to police
Suburban areas: about 43%
Rural areas: around 51%
National or local "reported" crime figures vastly understate the degree of crime, especially for urban areas, and especially for property crimes. Based on this data, the 4.5 percent national decrease in violence for 2024 could be a theoretical increase of 4.5 percent.
Having said this, your data for D.C. or elsewhere remains trustworthy. It may be a sample, but it's large enough to establish trends.
As to D.C., you can make whatever case you want as to crime statistics, as stated by several national publications. But 65 percent of D.C. residents told The Washington Post that crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem last year, even as violence declined. D.C. was ranked 2nd in the country for rates of homicides for cities with a population of 400,000-one million. D.C. was ranked 4th overall for homicides in 2024 per a university study, and as you know, homicides historically correlate nicely with overall crime statistics.
Is the surge in D.C. justified? We will have to wait for the results, but it's a radical departure from past practices. I traveled to high-crime cities courtesy of the federal government, and I have never seen sections of a city (D.C.) where practically every house has bars on the doors and windows. Yet the politics makes me uncomfortable.
I am very curious about the citywide increase in robberies in 2023-2024. Why? what kind of robberies? If not carjackings, then what? I hope that this article prompts many agencies to compare the public data to what was reported to the FBI. I would bet money that very few departments do that with any consistency.
A theft accomplished by force of fear is a robbery. And you are wrong. Data analysis is robust and ongoing both within law enforcement, in political circles, think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities
I know what constitutes a robbery and I also know that quality, actionable analysis is being done all over the place. I remain curious about the citywide increase in 2023 and I believe that few agencies consistently compare what is reported to the FBI with what is shared publicly.
Data analysis is robust and ongoing - it’s the data that is tainted. I can’t tell you how many reports that I took and properly classified as a specific crime wound up being finalized as either a lower classified crime or altogether reduced to a violation (non-crime). All in the name of statistics for local administrations for political gain. Data starts in the streets from the preliminary investigation, and goes askew after it leaves the sergeants desk.
Jeff, as you say, you're a "keyboard jockey sitting in New Orleans." You have your niche and you're doing a great job within it. But I'm in Washington, D.C. and your analysis seems bloodless and out-of-context.
This is what Trump said about DC: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.... Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They're on ATVs, motorbikes, they travel pretty well..... Today, we're formally declaring a public safety emergency. This is an emergency. This is a tragic emergency and it's embarrassing for me to be up here."
Only the last eight words are true. As you know, DC's violent crime rate was lower in 2024 than any time in the past 30+ years. Whatever the nitpicking, our violent crime rate is now lower in 2025 than in 2024. There are no roving gangs, mobs, maniacs, or mass youth rampage, and no emergency. This is all a big lie, which is a well-known tactic, literally from the fascist handbook.
We now have mobs of federal police and national guardsmen roaming our streets, not knowing what they are doing. This is a disgrace to America; our foreign allies are appalled and our enemies are laughing at us. I hope it never happens in New Orleans, but I think this is a test-run and you will be subjected to the same sooner or later.
So, maybe your columns could start with the overall truth before you get to your detailed data?
1) I think the News Media is being dishonest in its reporting re Washington DC. If you live in Northwest DC (Wards 1-3) then things may be peachy keen. Life is much different in Wards 8 and 7 south of the Anacostia River. But those people are poor so beneath the notice of the Washington Post and NY Times.
2) Ref: https://www.crimedatadc.com/ward/8
Number of homicides in Ward 8 in 2013-2014: 35,40
Note the MUCH higher number of homicides recently: 2022: 80 ; 2023: 98 ; 2024: 66
The same is true in Ward 7: 2013: 23 homicides 2014: 28
2022: 47 2023: 56 2024: 45
3) In my opinion, the News Media’s loud claim that violence has been falling in the past 30 years is an example of lying with statistics. Concealing things by diluting the homicides in Ward 7 and 8 with much larger population of the city as a whole.
4) Ward 8 population is 87,043. Using the usual measure of homicides per 100,000 , Ward 8’s homicide rate was 113 per 100,000 in 2023 and 76 in 2024.
5) The homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000 (FBI UCR 2024). In Mexico City it is 11 per 100,000. In Iraq it is 6 per 100,000. In Pakistan it is 4 per 100,000.
6) Our loyalty should be to our fellow Americans --especially to those most likely to be with our sons in the foxholes of the next war – and not to political parties. I say that as a registered Democrat who worked as a volunteer in Howard Dean and Barack Obama's Presidential campaigns and in the campaigns of several Democratic candidates for Congress.
And instead of defending the overall truth you would rather blanket this in hatred for the president with a longwinded and rather incorrect diatribe? As a person that isn’t a keyboard jockey, a person that lived this as a street cop - become more objective and take the politics out of your equation. Come out from behind your white picket fence and into the real deal. You may wind up agreeing with Trump after you see how muddied the water are in the world of Criminal Statistic gathering.
So your crime is lower now than last year when it was still a higher incidence t of crime? Do you understand what CompStat is? I suggest that you read up on that and the improprieties in the NYPD with that and you’ll see that numbers with downward trends with no specific conditions set forth by law enforcement should be handled with suspicion.
Agreed but let’s take one more step and ask ourselves if any rational adult in DC actually believes that Trump has our best interests at heart and that this isn’t just another colossal distraction from his failure/refusal to release the Epstein files. American civil liberties are taking a huge step backwards to obfuscate the sex crimes of some wealthy old men.
Please. Refresh your tin foil hat. Biden was in office for four years. Trump, from the moment he declared his candidacy to run again was persecuted, arrested, prosecuted, and even an attempted assassination on his life, not once but twice. Multiple outdated redundant misdemeanors stacked up that writhing the NYS PL mandated that such an amount of misdemeanors created felonies, without any victims would be enough to get him off the ballot. Combined with states trying to remove him from the ballot, and failing. Don’t you think a simple release of such files would have been authorized by Bidens DoJ? That even today an Obama judge is the one stating these files can’t be released - if Trump was mentioned even in one sentence that wouldn’t have already been written exposed? You’re throwing the proverbial spaghetti to see where it sticks, again. Move on from the nonsense. It’s a nothing burger and you’re sitting on the wrong side of history. DC is now ground zero for suppressing violent crime. Those that protest about it are obviously not residents of DC, or they are white libs that stand in false pretense so that crime doesn’t come to their suburban towns in Maryland and Virginia. You make a comment about sex crimes by old white men being obfuscated. Yet you ignore the fact that young black men’s lives are endangered by other young black men. But obviously it’s a play out of the left’s strategical play book. Go after the contrasting ideology without caring about the very people you want to champion - because you really don’t.
Thanks again, Jeff.
Data talks (tho' it doesn't always enunciate well);
BS walks…
Even if that data is tainted? Turning burglaries into trespass, grand theft auto into joyriding, felony assaults into misdemeanors, attempted murders into Assaults, robberies into larcenies…did you even add to the fact that a metro DC commander has been suspended for cooking the books on stats? This is a practice that goes back to 1994 in the NYPD - I know first hand because I lived it, and I complained about it.
Nationwide data shows that both Violent and Property Crime are down dramatically all across The Land of The (used to be) Free.
Is it your contention is that somehow, some way, the "metro DC" cops have figured out how to cook the books on ALL of the crime data/analyses from the FBI, BJS, CDC, Gun Violence Archive, Pew Research, Johns Hopkins, Brennan Center, Jeff-Alytics, ad Nauseam…? An impressive feat, that.
PS: Anecdotal evidence is an oxymoron.
We saw what soft-on-crime policy was like for the last 30 years and what it’s done to black communities. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but midnight basketball doesn’t work. https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/white-milksops-protest-in-dc-to-advocate
Like you, I don't have the data to comment on data manipulation, but I would like to focus on the serious problem with insinuating “reported” crime is the same thing as total crime which includes "unreported" crime. The result is that people from poor and fringe neighborhoods are being abused daily and living in totally intolerable conditions while the analyst and media mistakenly insinuate total crime is going down. The only three crimes where reported crime may have some correlation to actual numbers are murder, carjackings, and shootings where a bullet hole in a human being forces the victim to seek medical attention. These crimes are usually reported for obvious reasons.
Something totally unprecedented has occurred in poor and fringe neighborhoods over the last 4 years, something you formerly only saw in third world countries. Virtually, nobody will report theft, robbery, assault, harassment, physical threats, or display of or firing a gun because:
1. Laws have changed making drug possession, use, and distribution legal.
2. It is now a non-prosecutable misdemeanor or less to steal up to $1,000 or $1,500 a day in over half the states and $2,500 a day in some states.
3. It is now a non-prosecutable misdemeanor to empty the shelves of local stores multiple times.
4. It is now a non-prosecutable crime to mug, rob, beat, and assault people on the street or public transportation because they are always plead down to misdemeanor or no-crime.
5. Police have been neutered, and can no longer stop, search, chase or arrest suspected criminals.
6. Police have been demonized to the point where no sane person would ever aspire to be a cop.
7. Police have been defunded to the point where there is no proactive crime deterrence.
8. Police response times have risen from 30 minutes or less to 4 or 5 hours.
9. Police are powerless to stop retaliation against victims or witnesses who report crimes.
10. Cashless bail puts the criminal back at the victim's or witness's door the same day as the crime.
11. Arrests have dropped through the floor, and not because crime has decreased.
12. Soft-on-crime prosecutors reduce felonies to misdemeanors or no-crimes in the vast majority of cases.
13. Prosecutions have dropped through the floor. Every arrest but the most serious of crimes is pled down to no consequence.
14. In the unlikely event of both an arrest, and a prosecution, the possibility of any serious consequence for committing a crime is virtually zero.
15. And last but probably most important retaliation by the criminal or his gang makes it impossible for any victim or witness to ever appear in court.
Because of the above, justifiably no sane victim or witness will report a crime anymore. The result is “Unreported” crime which 4 years ago was estimated at 60% of “reported” crime, is now many times larger than “reported” crime. “Reported” and “unreported crime are now inversely correlated. No one can disagree that the above 15 items have and are occurring and that they discourage reporting of crime.
Evidence: take a look at your violent shooting rates for Chicago. But ShotSpotter records 360,000 shots fired annually, each discharge of a weapon in the city is a felony, not counting a citizen threatened, mugged, assaulted, or robbed, none of which is ever reported. Every time I am in a drug store or food store or big box store there are tons of folks picking up merchandise and walking out. Store personnel are told to not intervene. In Cook County you can now steal $999 eight times, and it’s OK. Nobody reports this. Have you adjusted the FBI "reported crime" stats to compensate for this? Please stop saying crime is down until you get a handle on "Unreported Crime”. I have hundreds of family and friends living in daily fear in these neighborhoods and it really destroys them when they hear crime is down, when its totally out of control in the neighborhoods of our most defenseless. At the very least, there should be a footnote on all crime reports (other than murder, car jackings, and shootings requiring medical attention) that this data only represents “reported crime”, and it is estimated that “unreported crime” could easily exceed “reported crime” by many times.
I concur with your take, Jeff. There's some noise, but it's coming from reporting by MPDC. It's not as if the NIBRS reporting is the result of independent counting or auditing from the FBI. I might, given some of the complexity in NIBRS reporting, actually put more weight on the department public reporting as most accurate if not entirely matching. What do you think the role of NIBRS is here in inherently raising the number of reported crimes? The traditional UCR model was hierarchical, report the most serious offence involved. NIBRS captures multiple offences in a single incident. I've seen estimates that it accounts for a low percentage of increase but that resounds differently to an analyst and a law enforcement chief executive.
I've spent convivial hours in the bar at both the old and new FOP lodge in DC. Lodge 1, in fact. folks are convinced that there is motivation by the brass to cook the books downward, I would note there is motivation by the union to got the other way a bit. The FOP endorses for President based on the vote of the Lodge members and has endorsed POTUS. I'm not seeing a chef in the data Jeff has published and analyzed
It's not that your stats are right or wrong - and I believe they are correct. It's the Trump angle that Dems are up in arms about. Don't believe me? The Democrat Governor of New Mexico activated the NM National Guard in April 2025 to patrol the streets of Albuquerque without controversy.
Hi Jeff: BJS recently offered "Only 38 Percent of Urban Crimes Are Reported To Law Enforcement."
The 38% figure comes from a BJS report titled “Reporting to Police by Type of Crime and Location of Residence, 2020–2023″. The report breaks down reporting rates by area type:
Urban areas: approximately 38% of violent victimizations were reported to police
Suburban areas: about 43%
Rural areas: around 51%
National or local "reported" crime figures vastly understate the degree of crime, especially for urban areas, and especially for property crimes. Based on this data, the 4.5 percent national decrease in violence for 2024 could be a theoretical increase of 4.5 percent.
Having said this, your data for D.C. or elsewhere remains trustworthy. It may be a sample, but it's large enough to establish trends.
As to D.C., you can make whatever case you want as to crime statistics, as stated by several national publications. But 65 percent of D.C. residents told The Washington Post that crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem last year, even as violence declined. D.C. was ranked 2nd in the country for rates of homicides for cities with a population of 400,000-one million. D.C. was ranked 4th overall for homicides in 2024 per a university study, and as you know, homicides historically correlate nicely with overall crime statistics.
Is the surge in D.C. justified? We will have to wait for the results, but it's a radical departure from past practices. I traveled to high-crime cities courtesy of the federal government, and I have never seen sections of a city (D.C.) where practically every house has bars on the doors and windows. Yet the politics makes me uncomfortable.
Thanks for what you are doing. Len.
I am very curious about the citywide increase in robberies in 2023-2024. Why? what kind of robberies? If not carjackings, then what? I hope that this article prompts many agencies to compare the public data to what was reported to the FBI. I would bet money that very few departments do that with any consistency.
A theft accomplished by force of fear is a robbery. And you are wrong. Data analysis is robust and ongoing both within law enforcement, in political circles, think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities
I know what constitutes a robbery and I also know that quality, actionable analysis is being done all over the place. I remain curious about the citywide increase in 2023 and I believe that few agencies consistently compare what is reported to the FBI with what is shared publicly.
Data analysis is robust and ongoing - it’s the data that is tainted. I can’t tell you how many reports that I took and properly classified as a specific crime wound up being finalized as either a lower classified crime or altogether reduced to a violation (non-crime). All in the name of statistics for local administrations for political gain. Data starts in the streets from the preliminary investigation, and goes askew after it leaves the sergeants desk.