U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro has alleged that Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department misclassified crime reports in ways that made the city appear safer than it was. Her comments follow a months‑long federal review of crime data and come amid heightened scrutiny of public safety in the nation’s capital.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia under President Donald Trump, has said that a federal review found widespread misclassification of crime reports by Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), which she argues made official crime statistics appear “artificially lower.”
Speaking on Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom with Dana Perino, Pirro said she believed there “certainly was an effort to misclassify, mischaracterize certain categories of crime,” describing it as “an attempt to make crime look lower than it was,” according to Fox News’ account of the interview.
Pirro said the federal investigation spanned several months, examined about 6,000 crime reports and involved interviews with more than 50 witnesses. She emphasized that the alleged conduct by MPD, as reviewed, did not in her view rise to the level of a criminal offense but argued that the department should take internal steps to address the issues.
Pirro also contrasted the current approach of her office under the Trump administration and Attorney General Pam Bondi with practices she said occurred under prior Democratic leadership. In the Fox News interview, she criticized the previous U.S. attorney’s handling of cases under President Joe Biden, claiming that a large share of arrests were not prosecuted, but she did not provide specific comparative percentages in that segment.
By contrast, Pirro said that under the Trump administration “every case is being looked at, every case being reviewed by my office,” and that if an arrest appears to reflect more serious conduct than initially charged, her office will seek to upgrade the offense.
Pirro argued that underreported crime can distort how police resources are deployed, weaken public confidence in law enforcement and discourage residents from reporting offenses. She linked recent federal involvement in D.C. to a sharp drop in key violent crime categories, saying that since a surge in federal resources, homicides are down 65% compared with the same period a year earlier, carjackings are down 68% and robberies are down 49%. Those figures were cited by Pirro in the Fox News interview and have not yet been independently verified by other public data.
Pirro’s accusations come as the Justice Department examines MPD’s crime-data practices, part of a broader national debate over how police departments report and classify crime and how those statistics shape public perceptions of safety.
