Fact check: Trump falsely claims Washington, DC, now has no crime at all
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — On Monday in Washington, DC, a man was shot dead. Two women were injured in a separate shooting. People reported dozens of other crimes to the police.
The next day, in both public remarks and an interview, President Donald Trump claimed that Washington now has “no crime.” He said Wednesday that “there is none,” making clear that he has been making a literal assertion that crime in the capital has completely vanished.
It hasn’t.
There’s no doubt crime is down in Washington since Trump took over its police force and deployed the National Guard in August. If Trump wants to make a case for his actions, there are lots of legitimate numbers he could cite.
Instead, as he has for years, he is using a bigger but fictional number.
“Washington, DC is a totally safe city. You’re not reporting any crime because there is none,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “They said crime is down 87%, and I said, ‘No it’s not. It’s down 100%.’”
It’s not “down 100%.” Publicly available police statistics make clear that crime continues to exist in the city of about 700,000 residents – as even supporters of Trump’s actions freely acknowledge.
For example, the union representing Washington police officers, whose leader has backed Trump’s federal takeover, posted on social media on Monday that, in the 21 days since the takeover was announced, overall crime had dropped 21%. That’s an unmistakable decline, but nowhere near “100%.”
What the numbers show
You can slice crime data in hundreds of ways. There is no way to find that Washington has “no crime” or that, as Trump has also claimed in recent days, “DC IS NOW A CRIME FREE ZONE.”
Despite the drop in crime since the federal takeover, the police figures show there are still hundreds of crimes occurring every week. Even Trump’s occasional hedged claim that there is now “virtually” no crime in the capital is unjustified.
In the last two weeks ending Sunday (August 18 – 31), reported overall crime in Washington was about 28% lower than in the two weeks ending the Sunday before the federal takeover (July 28 – August 10). Reported violent crime was down about 7%. All of that is good news. But it meant there were still more than 790 reported overall offenses during the more recent two-week span, including more than 85 reported violent offenses. That’s not “none.”
It’s inadvisable to make much of crime data from a single week, since the numbers can bounce around randomly, but it’s worth noting that crime in Washington didn’t cease in the week prior to Trump’s comments, either.
In the last week ending Sunday (August 25 – 31), reported overall crime in the capital was again about 27% lower than in the last week ending on the Sunday before the federal takeover (August 4 – 10), but that good news meant there were still more than 375 reported overall offenses. And reported violent crime was up about 23%, to more than 50 reported offenses.
Overall Washington crime was never down ‘87%’ during the takeover
On Wednesday, Trump contrasted his false “down 100%” claim with a supposed claim from other unspecified people that “crime is down 87%.” But overall crime in Washington has never been “down 87%” at any point of the takeover.
Rather, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser noted last week that the number of carjackings in particular was 87% lower during the first 20 days of the federal takeover than it was over the same 20 days in 2024. That’s excellent, but it’s not what Trump said. And there is some important context to note about the numbers: carjackings in Washington had already plummeted in 2025 before the federal takeover, another set of public police figures makes clear.
In July, the last full month before the takeover, there were 16 carjackings – down 64% from July 2024. Crime data expert Jeff Asher noted in early August that this was Washington’s lowest number of carjackings in any month since May 2020.
The number for August 2025 was even better – just 10 carjackings, six of them occurring before the federal takeover. This was the lowest figure since March 2020.
Trump could have made accurate points like this and have had his claims be both impressive and unimpeachable. Instead, he chose his habitual exaggeration.
The president did a similar kind of needless deceiving when, amid the federal takeover, Washington was experiencing a stretch of consecutive August days without a murder. Instead of simply touting the impressive streak, which ended at 12 days, Trump repeatedly claimed it was Washington’s first such streak in “years.” In fact, Washington had a 16-day murder-free stretch earlier this year.
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