Fact Check: The Fact Checks Were Wrong

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 06, 2025

 

They could have and should have hedged their bets, but they didn’t. The temptation to affirm with all undue confidence that Donald Trump was once again lying to you to advance his own nefarious ends proved irresistible.

 

That paragraph could serve as the introduction to innumerable media scandals over the last decade. The latest surrounds the reaction from Democrats and their media allies to the president’s August edict taking “direct federal control” of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., to curb what his administration claimed was an out-of-control crime problem in the District.

 

Trump’s claim that criminal violence in the nation’s capital “is getting worse, not getting better” occasioned a plethora of self-satisfied refutations. “After a spike in 2023, violent crime declined in 2024 and has declined again so far in 2025,” CNN reported, rapping Trump on the knuckles for failing to “acknowledge” that the city’s trend toward violence earlier in this decade “has since sharply reversed.”

 

“Trump Paints a Picture of D.C. as a Crime-Ridden Hell-Hole,” Time’s headline read. “Here Are the Facts.” Those irrefutable “facts” paint a portrait of a city in which violent crime “hit a 30-year low” following a staggering 35 percent decrease in such incidents in 2024. As the Council on Criminal Justice insisted, “there is an unmistakable and large drop in reported violence in the District since the summer of 2023,” a trend that is observable across the country.

 

Some Democrats and like-minded press outlets exercised a bit more caution. Of course, Trump’s rationale for taking over the District’s police is “wrong and unwarranted,” Anthony Coley, the former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, wrote for MSNBC. Crime is falling, and “Washingtonians see notable progress,” but they don’t “feel” safe. Democrats should be careful not to invalidate that false assumption, even if they’re armed with incontrovertible data that calls their delusions into question.

 

That was the line on which savvy Democratic operatives settled. “All of the crime numbers suggest that violent crime is down in every major city. I don’t think that people are going to believe that,” former Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis observed. “I’m not saying that the numbers are wrong; it’s just that the perception is what it is.” Condescending though that may be, it’s not unsound advice. And yet the Democratic id could not be suppressed. “Crime is down in most major cities — including Washington, DC — in spite of Donald Trump, not because of him,” the Democratic Mayors Association insisted.

 

Even at the time, Democrats had every reason to know that these imprudent assertions would come back to haunt them. In the month leading up to Trump’s D.C. takeover, the chairman of the District’s Fraternal Order of Police, Gregg Pemberton, was telling anyone willing to listen that officers were under pressure to falsify crime statistics.

 

“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Pemberton told a local NBC affiliate. “So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”

 

That wasn’t just Pemberton’s impression. In July, D.C. police commander Michael Pulliam was suspended amid an investigation into allegations that he participated in a conspiracy to “manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year.” On Sunday, a report in the Washington Post substantiated the allegation that statistical book-cooking was a department-wide enterprise.

 

Post reporters Jenny Gathright and Olivia George obtained “lists” that officers maintained that purport to document “cases where they believed a higher-up improperly classified a crime as a lesser offense.”

 

“One such tally, obtained by The Washington Post, lists more than 150 instances since March 2024 where staff in a Southeast D.C. police district believed offenses were, at least initially, inappropriately classified,” the dispatch continued.

 

“Some rank-and-file officers and detectives have complained for months — in some cases, years — that managers were recording serious crimes as more minor ones to make their police districts appear safer or avoid the ire of top department brass,” these reporters noted. As one detective indicated, the documentation these officers secretly kept was “not a politically motivated thing.” But, with investigations now underway in both the GOP-led House and the Republican-occupied U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., “the long-standing concerns have found a receptive audience.”

 

Which is another way of saying that these allegations would never have received a fair hearing unless Republicans provided one. That is not a “messaging” problem. It has nothing to do with how the public “perceives” their environment, erroneously or otherwise. The perception problem here is among Democrats, for whom any claim from Trump — particularly one that reflects negatively on their party’s record in public office — must be “pure lies.”

 

The allegations of systemic data manipulation are hardly ironclad, but there’s too much meat on those bones now to summarily dismiss them. But given those allegations, prudence would militate against placing too much faith in the numbers. And yet, as is so often the case in the Trump era, the facts that are too good to check don’t get checked. And Democrats wonder why they have a problem on the issue of crime. It’s not just that they don’t know how to talk about it or what to do about it. Rather, they seem not to care about it if they can make the plausible political case that those who concern themselves with street violence are overreacting.