President Donald Trump, justifying his temporary federal takeover of policing in the nation’s capital, claimed at a press conference Monday that the violent crime situation in Washington, DC, “is getting worse, not getting better.” He asserted in an executive order that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia” and that there is “rising violence in the capital.”
But violence in the capital is actually falling. After a spike in 2023, violent crime declined in 2024 and has declined again so far in 2025.
Washington has been a relatively high-crime place for decades, with a homicide rate that has persistently been among the country’s worst for big cities – though the district has gotten markedly safer since the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. And Washington suffered a sharp increase in violence in 2023, which included its highest number of homicides since the late 1990s and a near-doubling of reported carjackings compared to the previous year.
Trump highlighted that 2023 spike on Monday. He didn’t acknowledge, though, that the trend has since sharply reversed.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, wrote in a blog post Monday: “The bottom line is that violent crime in DC is currently declining and the city’s reported violent crime rate is more or less as low now as it has been since the 1960s. (Standard disclaimer that not all crimes are reported to police.) The city’s official violent crime rate in 2024 was the second lowest that has been reported since 1966.”
Adam Gelb, president and chief executive officer of the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks urban crime, said in a Monday statement: “The numbers shift depending on what time period and what types of crime you examine. But overall there’s an unmistakable and large drop in violence since the summer of 2023, when there were peaks in homicide, gun assaults, robbery, and carjacking.”
Gelb also noted the district’s level of violence is generally higher than average for his organization’s sample of US cities – and that its improvement mirrors national trends. Violent crime declined nationally in 2024, and early figures assembled by Asher and colleagues from hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country suggest it also declined this year through May.
Homicides spiked in 2023, but then fell
Trump correctly noted at the Monday press conference that 2023 was a terrible year for murders in Washington. The district of about 700,000 residents had 274 reported homicides, its highest figure since 1997.
But Trump was wrong when he said 2023 saw the capital’s highest murder rate “probably ever.” Washington had far more homicides in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it had a smaller population; it exceeded 470 homicides in both 1990 and 1991.
More pressingly, Trump didn’t mention Monday that the number of homicides in Washington has fallen sharply since 2023. It fell 32% in 2024, to 187 homicides, and had fallen another 12% in 2025 through Sunday, to a preliminary count of 99 homicides.
Of course, one homicide is too many, and it’s a matter of perspective whether one chooses to focus on the startling number of homicides or the decline in that number. But it’s just not true that the number is getting worse. It’s also worth noting that Washington’s 2024 number of homicides, 187, was better than its number in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first presidency, when Washington had 198 homicides during a national spike amid the turmoil of early Covid-19 pandemic and a furor over race and policing.
Washington had better numbers in every other year of Trump’s first presidency and the entire eight-year Obama administration before that.
Carjackings are also on the decline
Trump repeatedly invoked carjacking at the Monday press conference, accurately noting that a former staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was victimized in an attempted carjacking earlier this month.
Washington has had a significant carjacking problem in recent years. The number of reported carjackings – many of them committed by juvenile offenders – skyrocketed in 2023, to 959. That was nearly double the number in 2022 (485) and more than six times the number in 2019 (152).
But as with murder, the trend reversed in 2024; the number of reported carjackings plummeted to around 500. It has fallen again so far in 2025, with 188 carjackings reported through Saturday – down from nearly 300 through the same point in 2024.
The 2025 number is still high, no doubt. But these numbers also undercut Trump’s claim that the situation is worsening.
“Carjackings are still reported more frequently now than they were before Covid, but there has been a consistent drop for more than 18 months. The 16 carjackings reported in DC in July 2025 were the fewest reported in a month since May 2020 – before the surge – and represented an 87 percent drop from July 2023’s total,” Asher wrote Monday.
An unproven allegation about Washington data
The union representing Washington police officers has alleged that the district force has deliberately manipulated how it classifies some offenses to make the district’s crime picture look better than it is. The White House promoted this allegation on Monday, asserting on social media that “they’re cooking the books.”
That claim has not been proven; Trump himself framed it more gently, saying the administration would “look into that.” In April, Trump’s hand-picked interim US attorney for the district, Ed Martin, unquestioningly cited Washington’s data in a press release in which he credited the president’s leadership for how “the District has seen a significant decline in violent crime” this year.
And Asher noted to CNN that while it’s not possible to definitively dismiss the union’s unproven allegation about the data, a variety of local statistics also suggest declining violence – such as ShotSpotter gunfire data; hospital data on injuries caused by firearms; and the data on homicide, the hardest crime to potentially misclassify. “So either all those independent sources are lying or gun violence is falling fast in DC, matching national trends,” Asher said.
Asher himself separately questioned some of Washington’s publicly reported data for 2024 and 2025 given the extent of its divergence from some of the data it has reported to the FBI, though he said that the district’s generally high-quality public disclosure means he is likely observing “a data reporting issue rather than an intentional misrepresentation.” But even with his questions about some of the district’s figures, which you can read about here, he wrote, “There’s still tons of evidence pointing to declining violent crime in DC in 2025, especially gun violence.” He added, “Even if we can’t say for certain from the publicly available data how far it’s falling, there’s no reason to suspect the overall trend being reported isn’t correct.”
Various other cities that have historically had high numbers of homicides, including Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit, have also seen substantial declines in 2024, 2025 or both.
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