Examining claim violent crime in Washington, DC, is at 30-year low

In August 2025, after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the law enforcement takeover of Washington, D.C., by the National Guard, citing "out of control" crime in the nation's capital, a claim began to spread that violent crime in the city was in fact at a 30-year low. 

For example, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser's account posted this statistic on X (archived), adding that D.C. was a "beautiful city":

As of this writing, the post had more than 2 million views and 23,000 likes. The claim circulated widely on X, including in a post (archived) by former U.S. Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel, who added that the capital wasn't even among the 10 most dangerous cities in the country. Facebook users also shared the claim.

The claim stemmed from a Jan. 3, 2025, announcement by the U.S. attorney's office for the District of Columbia, based on 2024 data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the city's law enforcement agency. The announcement referred to total violent crime in the city, not adjusted for population.

Digging into annual reports on the MPD website, Snopes found data going back to 1991 and compiled it into a chart, looking specifically at total numbers for violent crime as well as the crime rate per 100,000 inhabitants. We found that indeed, in absolute terms, the number of violent crimes had dropped to its lowest point not just since 1995, but since at least 1991. The violent crime rate, however, told a slightly different story, as it showed an uptick in 2023 after a historic low in 2022 (authorities had not shared a violent crime rate for 2024; Snopes contacted the U.S. attorney's office and will update this report should it respond):

Both the D.C. police and the FBI — which compiles crime statistics from agencies across the country to track national trends — include four types of crime under the umbrella term of "violent crime," though they define some of the subcategories differently. Overall, they both include homicides, rapes, robberies and certain assaults; in the last subcategory, for example, the FBI includes all types of aggravated assaults, while according to its annual reports starting some time between 2005 and 2007, the MPD included only assaults committed with a dangerous weapon, which at least one analyst suggested may overestimate how much overall numbers for violent crime fell.

Other critics expressed skepticism (archived) about recent MPD numbers due to reports that one department commander had been placed under investigation in July 2025 for allegedly downgrading reported violent crimes into lesser crimes in an effort to deflate the city's violent crime numbers.

Though it was true that MPD data showed total violent crime at a 30-year low in Washington, Snopes also looked at the FBI's numbers because of the misgivings about the D.C. agency's data.

In August 2025, the FBI released a report that showed national crime rates overall had dropped in 2024 from the previous year, revealing that the trend in Washington was not unique. Violent crime, in particular, dropped by 4.5% from 2023 to 2024. It also had fallen by 5.5% from 2020 and 0.7% from 2015. This was based on data reported by nearly 17,000 agencies.

The absolute numbers showed that violent crime in the capital was at a level not seen since 2018 (note that not all violent crime gets reported). Before the pandemic, violent crime in the city was trending down (we did not take into account the gaps in the data in 2021 and 2022 as local law enforcement agencies transitioned from one reporting system to another):

However, a more revealing indicator is the violent crime rate, which accounts for the size of the population. Washington's population dropped from roughly 800,000 in the mid-1960s to a low of 519,000 in 1999, then rebounded to 702,250 in 2024, according to the Saint Louis Federal Reserve based on U.S. Census data. Taking into account these variations, FBI data revealed that violent crime in D.C. was not only at a 30-year low, but at a low not seen since 1966 (as noted above, we did not take into account the gaps in the data in 2021 and 2022). 

Snopes used the FBI Crime Data Explorer to examine violent crime numbers from 1960 and 1995:

In other words, without relying solely on MPD data, the numbers reveal that the city's violent crime rate has been dropping since 1993 and reached a low in 2024 not seen in nearly six decades.