The Wire Comes to Washington: Trump Moves to End DC's Crime Data Deception
"It is one thing for crime to rise. It is another for leaders to lie about it. Washington DC has managed both. Over the past five years, residents have watched their neighborhoods slide into a state of fear. Homicides, carjackings, armed robberies, brazen daylight assaults, each became less shocking simply through repetition. Yet official reports told a strangely different story. Crime, they said, was falling. In some categories, it had supposedly plummeted to lows not seen in decades. This week, President Trump ended that charade. Invoking the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, he placed General Pam Bondi in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department, called up the National Guard, and deployed federal law enforcement to restore safety. The move was not merely about controlling crime, but about confronting a culture of statistical deceit that has insulated city leaders from accountability.
"To understand the depth of that deceit, one need only recall HBO's The Wire. The show immortalized the phrase "juking the stats" to describe how police under political pressure manipulate numbers. Make robberies into larcenies, make rapes disappear, and magically the crime rate drops while the community suffers as much or more than before. Washington's experience mirrors this fiction in ways that are uncomfortable precisely because they are real. Whistleblowers in the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) have testified for years that serious crimes were routinely reclassified as lesser offenses. Felonies became misdemeanors, aggravated assaults became simple assaults, burglaries became unlawful entries. When the public sees the quarterly report, it sees only the rebranded numbers, not the bodies on the pavement or the families shattered."
Liberalism is a mental disorder
— @amuse (@amuse) August 11, 2025