DC CompStat Numbers

Evidently, DC Police were lying about crime for years:

• The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district's crime statistics, court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Police brass repeatedly told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, according to internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts the Free Beacon reviewed.

  Former MPD sergeant Charlotte Djossou sued the department in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. Djossou, who joined the force after serving honorably in Iraq, accused MPD brass of attempting to "distort crime statistics" by "downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be 'fewer' felonies in the statistics." She also provided records showing that police leaders explicitly instructed their subordinates to underclassify certain instances of theft to keep them out of the crime stats the city reports to the public.

And now they paid her, mere weeks after a command staff member was suspended for doing what was obviously DC policy for years.

That was the entire point of CompStat when New York started it - downgrading crime so politicians could run on the "crime is down!" platform. 

We found the book and the post we wrote back in 2012 about the numbers game: 

It might even still be available.