I & I Editorial BoardWe’ve come to expect that no matter what President Donald Trump says or does these days, the mainstream press will rush out to say he’s wrong. So, we weren’t the least bit surprised when, after Trump said crime in the nation’s capital is out of control and called in the National Guard, news outlets immediately dismissed his claims.
But who is doing the lying here?
Crime in D.C. “is getting worse, not getting better,” Trump said. Nonsense, came the chorus of press reports, with headlines such as:
- “Fact check: Violent crime in DC has fallen in 2024 and 2025 after a 2023 spike” said CNN.
- “Trump Takes Control of D.C. Police, Citing ‘Bloodthirsty Criminals.’ But Crime Is Down.” said the New York Times.
- “FACT FOCUS: Trump exaggerates, misstates facts on Washington crime” said AP.
The implicit message is that Trump is making up a crime problem to flex his authoritarian muscles.
These and countless other stories all cite the same set of police department statistics showing the rate of violent crime in D.C. on the downtrend.
So, case closed, right?
Not so fast. Just a few weeks ago, the local NBC affiliate reported that:
A D.C. police commander is under investigation for allegedly making changes to crime statistics in his district.
The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May … Pulliam — the former commander of the 3rd District that patrols Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights — was placed on leave with pay and told he was under investigation for questionable changes to crime data, five law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told News4.
Also in July, The Hill ran an op-ed by Michael Murphy, who is considering a run for city council, pointing out that the city has started reporting some crimes, such as “assault with a dangerous weapon,” as a “felony threat,” which doesn’t get counted as a violent crime. Voila, violent crime rates in the city started falling.
I have learned that systematic undercharging is fueling some portion of these so-called declines in violent crime. In short, a manipulation of the crime statistics is causing them not to align with reality, which helps explain why people in Washington don’t feel safe …
These concerns are not solely my own. On May 22, Greg Pemberton, head of the D.C. Police Union, stated that the department ‘is past its breaking point.’
‘To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,’ he added.
Then there’s the fact that the head of the D.C. police union praised Trump’s takeover of law enforcement.
“We stand with the president in recognizing that Washington, D.C., cannot continue on this trajectory,” said union chair Gregg Pemberton. “Crime is out of control, and our officers are stretched beyond their limits.”
By ignoring all this, the press is knowingly spreading misinformation about what is happening in the city as part of its own campaign to brand Trump a liar.
This is hardly the first time the media have sheepishly fallen for phony crime statistics when it suited their political agenda.
Last year, we noted in this space how the press was “fact checking” Trump on national crime statistics during the presidential campaign. Then it was FBI crime statistics that, like the D.C. numbers, appeared to show a drop in violent crime.
But, as we said, the claim was “wildly misleading … It’s based on the number of crimes plugged into the FBI’s ‘Uniform Crime Reporting’ database, which not every police department contributes to – a situation made worse after the FBI changed its reporting system in 2021.”
We informed readers that the separate Bureau of Justice Statistics’ survey of crime victimization showed the opposite – the number of victims of violent crime was 41% higher in 2023 than in 2020. (See: The Media’s Criminal Misreporting on Crime.)
We are beginning to wonder if there is anything the public can trust the media to report accurately when it comes to Trump.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I & I can only continue reporting verifiable truth. What else is there to do? There was a time when “shame” would have been a rather effective medicine keeping the media from so frequently and purposely spreading lies or distorting stories to serve a political agenda but we lost shame and a real sense of right and wrong along with it. I believe in the power of a free market to find honest sources of information and I believe the public is wise enough to seek out those sources and bankrupt the rest.
“We are beginning to wonder if there is anything the public can trust the media to report accurately when it comes to Trump.”
Beginning? Where have you been? And here I thought you were one of the few outlets who managed somehow to uncover and report the facts. Silly me!
I probably should’ve bracketed the above with ..
The problem with rising crime is secondary, in my opinion.
The more trenchant problem is the mendacity of the legacy media. It almost seems-and I find this to be true on all subjects reported-that the main stream media ferrets out controversial and untrue facts so that they can argue a certain position.
Now we see that statistical data that the government uses is also in doubt.
It’s hard not to conclude that honor, sobriety, virtue and truth are far less appealing to the legacy media; to government; to those who manufacture statistics.
These problems began, I believe, with the Clinton Administration and ramped up during Obama’s Administration, receiving another boost during the Covid Crisis and hitting it’s lying pinnacle (in my opinion) during Biden.
Let’s hope during Trump’s Administration it is now falling. However, like the old saying, “it’s always darkest before the dawn” the affliction of the infection of lies and political manipulation of the “facts” is like the fever that increases before it breaks.
During the Biden Administration, whatever wasn’t lied about (for example, playing fast-&-loose with the improvised data that was suppose to show the US economic condition) was ignored and became problems because they were ignored.
For instance, our military readiness; our armaments supply; our economic condition (especially the unemployment and employment data);giving money to Ukraine without any auditing, etc).
It appears that our hopes that China would become more democratic once it joined the World Trade Organization has melted.
We’ve, unfortunately, become more (in our statistical data, which the Chinese CCP media and government either hide or analyze in a political manner) like China!
Great article. In fact, the alternative media is really handing the legacy media their lunch. Since 11/2024, the legacy media has DOUBLED DOWN on extremism and TDS. Part of their anger is that they do not control the narrative any longer. Taking X away from the Bernaysian Propagandists echoes their pain, to this day.
I am a liberal, former lifelong Democrat who is now disgusted with his former party. I am part of a group of former Democrats who shows typically Democrat voting groups that (a) the media is lying to us and (b) run as far away from the Democratic party as possible, until they boot their extremists.
And, most of us BLAME the biased media for making the Democratic party as corrupt, crooked, shady and lazy as they are today.
The question of whether crime in D.C. has gone up or down in the last year misses the bigger point, which is that the city has a serious crime problem. In 2024 D.C. had the fourth highest violent homicide rate of metro areas with over a million population. The D.C. rate of over 35 per 100,000 population is about seven times the national average. I’d say that constitutes a crime problem even if total reported crime in the city decreased from the year before. The mainstream media is trying to downplay the problem but nobody who is familar with the situation believes them.
In all my 69yrs I never thought I’d see a time when grown adults would speak into a camera or sign their name to an article that is NOTHING but bald face LIES. But we now have a completely Godless political party and their propaganda arm “media” doing EXACTLY that.
Most all our News is Fake/Leftists Propaganda Not Real News