Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon highlights inconvenient news for city leaders in the nation’s capital.
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.
The lawsuit, as well as the city’s decision to settle, calls into question the prevailing narrative presented in mainstream media outlets as President Donald Trump carries out a D.C. crime crackdown. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico have all cited data from the Metropolitan Police Department to contend that D.C. crime is low and Trump’s crackdown is unnecessary. That coverage did not mention whistleblowers like Djossou, nor did it disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats.
Though elements of Djossou’s case have previously been reported, the settlement has not. Neither have several exhibits the legal proceedings brought to light, including a 2022 deposition of MPD commander Randy Griffin. At the time of the events in question, Griffin oversaw D.C’s Fourth District in the northernmost part of the city. He confirmed in his deposition that he tasked a police captain, Franklin Porter, with finding “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics” in April 2018.
