The Metropolitan Police Department terminated at least three officials Monday after an internal affairs investigation found they manipulated crime statistics in the nation's capital, a quiet reckoning that follows months of damning federal reports, a congressional probe, and the resignation of the police chief who allegedly presided over the whole scheme.
Second District Commander Tatjana Savoy and Commander Michael Pulliam were among those who received termination papers, the Daily Caller reported. Both had denied the allegations. Additional officials were reportedly told Monday they would face firing or discipline as well. The terminations came after internal affairs investigated accusations that MPD personnel systematically downgraded violent crimes to make the district's numbers look better than they were.
The firings did not happen in a vacuum. Two federal reports released in 2025 had already shredded the department's credibility on crime data. One December report called MPD's statistics "likely unreliable and inaccurate due to misclassifications," concluding that "violent crime is not being accurately documented and reported to the public." Former D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith resigned shortly after those findings went public.
The scope of the misconduct appears to stretch well beyond the three officials who lost their jobs Monday. AP News reported that Interim D.C. Police Chief Jeffery Carroll placed 13 officers on administrative leave in connection with the internal investigation into how the department kept crime statistics. Carroll told reporters the investigation began earlier this year after a referral from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
"What I can tell you is there were allegations of misconduct that were made, and based on those allegations, members were investigated, and the outcome is related to these individuals," Carroll said.
Carroll also noted that the officers had not yet been fired because "the administrative process must be allowed to take its course", a nod to due-process rights that still protect the accused even as the evidence piles up.
The House Oversight Committee had already laid the groundwork for accountability. Its report, titled "How D.C.'s Police Chief Undermined Crime Data Accuracy," accused Smith by name of failing to adequately address crime in Washington. Committee Chairman James Comer framed the probe in stark terms, as the New York Post reported.
"The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating disturbing allegations that DC crime data is inaccurate and intentionally manipulated, potentially at the direction of Metropolitan Police Department leadership," Comer said.
That investigation drew on whistleblower testimony. A whistleblower told the committee that senior MPD officials directed subordinates to manipulate crime data on a widespread basis. The allegations were not abstract. DC Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton described a concrete, ground-level mechanism for how the fraud worked.
"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 said.
That account matches what the Daily Caller's own October exclusive found: sources close to law enforcement said suspects were allowed to "wiggle out of... more serious charges," and that directives to minimize violent crime reports were "pervasive from the top, all the way down." The MPD, in other words, did not merely lose track of a few case files. The department allegedly ran a top-down operation to rewrite reality.
The pattern had been visible for years to anyone willing to look. Long before Congress got involved, a former MPD sergeant named Charlotte Djossou tried to sound the alarm from inside the department. She sued after alleging that department leaders punished her for exposing a practice of downgrading felonies to misdemeanors to shrink reported crime numbers, as the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Court records and internal communications in the case showed supervisors directed officers to classify some thefts as "Taking Property Without Right", a category that conveniently was not tracked in the D.C. Crime Report. The lawsuit included claims that violent crimes such as assaults with dangerous weapons, robberies, burglaries, and felony assaults were routinely downgraded or rerouted for lesser classification. The city quietly settled Djossou's lawsuit.
One internal email captured the attitude perfectly. Captain Franklin Porter wrote to sergeants: "I don't want to be notified that we have a part one [felony] offense in an email." The message was clear: don't bring me bad numbers. And if the numbers are bad, make them something else.
The internal tensions within MPD leadership over questionable directives have been a recurring theme, one that long predates these terminations.
At the center of the scandal sits Pamela Smith, who served as D.C. police chief until her December resignation. A separate Department of Justice report criticized Smith's leadership, alleging she pressured law enforcement to manipulate crime statistics. The DOJ report described a "culture of coercive fear that emanates from Pamela Smith."
That phrase, "coercive fear", goes well beyond garden-variety bureaucratic dysfunction. It suggests a department where rank-and-file officers understood that accurate crime reporting could cost them their careers, while dishonest reporting kept the boss happy. The MPD downgraded hundreds of crimes to show a decrease in the crime rate, according to the reporting.
Neither the House Oversight investigation nor the U.S. Attorney's Office probe resulted in criminal charges. The Washington Times confirmed that both investigations found pressure and misclassification of reports that made crime rates appear lower, but the consequences so far have been limited to administrative action, firings, leave, and Smith's resignation.
That raises an obvious question: if commanders systematically falsified public safety data in the nation's capital, why has no one faced criminal prosecution?
The real cost of cooked books falls on the people who live and work in Washington. When violent crime gets reclassified as something lesser, the public loses its ability to make informed decisions about safety. Neighborhoods that should have received more police resources got fewer. Residents who deserved honest answers about what was happening on their streets got a sanitized fiction instead.
The broader public safety climate in D.C. has been deteriorating for years. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared an emergency and reinstated a juvenile curfew after weeks of teen disorder, a step that itself reflected a city struggling to maintain basic order.
Meanwhile, the district's courts and police leadership have faced scrutiny from multiple directions. The Supreme Court weighed in on police conduct in a D.C. vehicle stop case, and episodes of mass disorder, including incidents where hundreds of teenagers flooded the Navy Yard despite a police curfew zone, have tested the department's capacity and credibility.
All of this unfolded while MPD's leadership was allegedly cooking the numbers to pretend the problem was smaller than it was.
Pulliam had already been placed on administrative leave with pay before Monday's termination papers arrived. Savoy was among those who denied the allegations. Neither has been quoted publicly responding to the firings. The full list of officials who received termination papers Monday has not been disclosed, nor has the department revealed which additional personnel were told they would face firing or discipline.
The internal affairs investigation, the House Oversight report, the DOJ findings, the Djossou lawsuit, the union chairman's testimony, and the whistleblower accounts all point in the same direction: this was not a rogue commander here or a lazy clerk there. This was, by every available account, a systemic effort to deceive the public about how dangerous their city had become.
The debate over whether anti-police policy decisions carry real consequences has played out in cities across the country. In Washington, the question is slightly different, and arguably worse. The police were not defunded. They were directed, allegedly from the top, to lie about what they were finding.
Three officials lost their jobs Monday. Thirteen more sit on leave. The former chief resigned months ago. But the residents who made decisions about where to live, where to walk, and how safe to feel, based on numbers their own police department allegedly fabricated, have received no settlement, no apology, and no assurance it won't happen again.
When the people charged with keeping the public safe decide instead to keep the public fooled, firing a handful of commanders is the floor, not the ceiling.
