President Donald Trump has exaggerated and, at times, misstated statistics and facts about crime in Washington, D.C., to justify his decision to deploy the National Guard in the city.
Despite violent crime rates falling in the nation’s capital over the last two years, Trump asserted, on Monday, that the city “has been taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”
For that reason, the president has directed approximately 800 National Guard members to D.C. to help local law enforcement take control of what the president claims is uncontrollable crime. A portion of those National Guard members began patrolling the city on Tuesday.
But Trump’s depiction of D.C. as lawless and filled with violent criminals is inaccurate.
Violent crime rates in D.C. peaked in 2023 post-pandemic, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. The number of homicides that year was 274, the highest since the late 1990s.
“Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate, probably ever,” Trump said on Monday. “They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years, can’t be worse.”
The 2023 homicide rate was not the highest the city has ever experienced – data, which goes back to 1960, indicates homicides peaked in the nation’s capital in 1991. The 2023 rate has declined by 63 percent since 1991.
Overall, violent crime has gone down by 35 percent since 2023. Sex abuse rates have gone down 71 percent, and assaults with a dangerous weapon have dropped 62 percent.
The White House released a fact sheet as part of Trump’s announcement, citing D.C.’s homicide rate in 2024 as the fourth highest in the country, with 27.3 per 100,000 residents.
However, the fact sheet appeared to incorrectly summarize information from a preliminary crime data report that exclusively used Washington Post reporting, which found D.C.’s 2023 murder rate to be the fifth highest among the largest cities.
But that the homicide rate dropped in 2024 and was not ranked in the top four cities, according to the Post.
Trump also compared D.C. homicide rates to those of “the worst places on Earth,” claiming murders are higher in the U.S. city than Bogotá, Colombia, or Mexico City, Mexico.
Data indicates that Washington, D.C. has a higher homicide rate than Mexico City, which recorded approximately 10 per 100,000 residents, or Bogotá, which recorded 15.2 per every 100,000 in 2024.
But neither Mexico City nor Bogotá were ranked in the top 50 global cities with the highest homicide rates, according to the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think tank.
Washington, D.C., was ranked 50 in 2023 – meaning there are at least 49 other cities with higher homicide rates.
