Thread by @America1stLegal

/1 🚨D.C. Crime Stat Scandal Explained

Yesterday, @freebeacon reported that the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) quietly settled a case about false stats.

AFL reviewed the docket in that case and other materials. It's like something straight out of The Wire.

/2 D.C. has been playing fast and loose with the crime stats for years.

The lawsuit that MPD settled this week was a whistleblower retaliation suit, filed in 2020, by a police Sergeant who spoke out against the MPD’s apparent practice of recording felonies as misdemeanors.

/3 Starting in 2019, MPD Sergeant Djossou tried to expose the fake stats that D.C. government leadership apparently wanted for their own purposes.

At first, she succeeded in getting over 100 misdemeanor cases properly re-marked as felonies.

/4 But this problem was already too widespread.

In one example from 2019, MPD responded to a call from a victim reporting that someone had “slashed her face and neck with an unknown object.”

MPD recorded this as a “simple assault,” a misdemeanor under D.C. law.

/5 Sgt. Djossou’s lawsuit alleged that crimes would often be downgraded in the stats when they were unlikely to be solved.

/6 Emails from MPD seem to reflect this, with multiple crimes being downgraded in the stats because they lacked “solvability factors.”

“Solvability” has nothing to do with the seriousness of a crime. An unsolved felony does not magically become a misdemeanor.

/7 Moreover, this practice was applied to crimes that were solved.

Just yesterday, a Washington Examiner reporter shared her story of how DC police downgraded the crime of her assailant in 2020, despite the perpetrator being convicted and sentenced to jail.

https://x.com/Anna_Giaritelli/status/1956012350395355521

/8 According to deposition testimony obtained during the lawsuit, MPD had a practice of knowingly and systematically downgrading theft charges were classified as “taking property without right” to avoid “driving up the crime statistics.”

/9 Sgt. Djossou herself reported an alarming incident where she responded to a “Assault with a Dangerous Weapon Knife (Domestic Violence)” but saw it instead classified as yet another “simple assault,” rather than the violent felony it actually was.

/10 Emails from 2019 show another alarming incident, where MPD responded to the scene of an Assault with a Deadly Weapon (ADW) and MPD command staff recorded the incident under the code for “Sick person to the hospital.”

/11 Djossou reported up other instances of the same behavior as well. In a transcript of a recorded call between herself and Captain Conboy, she explained her concern that the watch commander had recorded another assault with a deadly weapon as a “simple assault.”  In that incident, a woman was strangled by her boyfriend, who then threw a knife at her head.

/12 Sadly, instead of being rewarded for her efforts, she was reprimanded and punished, sending a clear message that the fraudulent statistics were sanctioned by higher powers.

She even testified about this experience to the D.C. City Council.

/13 Per the lawsuit, the D.C. City Council did nothing to investigate Sgt. Djossou’s claims and the police continued to retaliate against her.

/14 D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith has stated that “any irregularity in crime data brought to my attention will be addressed immediately.”

But history paints a different picture.

This problem is not a recent one or one that popped up overnight. Will the D.C. political leadership support the men and women in blue? Will they ensure accurate crime stats?

Or will they betray the men and women in MPD as part of a political ploy to engage in lawfare against President Trump?