(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The local government of the District of Columbia has settled a lawsuit filed by a police sergeant who accused her superiors of misclassifying offense records to deflate crime statistics, the Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.
Charlotte Djossou, a former sergeant at the Metropolitan Police Department, sued the department in 2020 over alleged retaliation after she condemned the reported scheme.
According to the Free Beacon, Djossou accused MPD brass of trying to “distort crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.”
pour one out for all the anchors and pundits touting DC's supposed "30 year low" crime stats. Lol. Turns out they were – as we all knew – falsifying the numbers. who will have the guts to admit it today? https://t.co/vc3KnW78Me
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 14, 2025
The outlet noted that her attorneys filed records exposing police officials “explicitly instructed their subordinates to underclassify certain instances of theft to keep them out of the crime stats the city reports to the public.”
The settlement comes as President Donald Trump continues expanding federal law enforcement’s presence in the DC area, including deploying the National Guard, in response to what Republicans have called out as rampant lawlessness.
Leftist media outlets—including The Washington Post and Politico—have repeatedly dismissed Trump’s claims that crime is soaring in the district, citing the same internal MPD data now under scrutiny.
It is unclear how far this crime-deflating scheme spread through various precincts, but the settlement and deposition records had remained private until Thursday.
In a 2022 deposition, MPD commander Randy Griffin admitted that in 2018, he ordered police captain Franklin Porter to find “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics.”
It gets worse. Porter allegedly worked with former MPD lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky to classify felonies such as “shoplifting” and “theft” under the vague “Taking Property Without Right” (TPWOR) category.
The case records showed that Zabavsky “acknowledged this was done because TPWOR reports are not tracked in the D.C. Crime Report.“
