Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department went more than a decade without an independent system for ensuring crimes were properly classified, while employees described a culture in which supervisors sometimes influenced classifications to produce desired crime trends, according to a new report from the city’s inspector general.
The 40-page report, released Tuesday, found what investigators called a “prolonged, systemic breakdown” in the Metropolitan Police Department’s controls over crime reporting between 2015 and 2025. Among the problems: an independent unit responsible for reviewing crime reports had been eliminated; policies remained in effect years after the offices and computer systems they referenced had disappeared; and users of the department’s records system could make changes to approved reports without automatically notifying the officers who wrote them.
The department also was not routinely examining electronic audit logs that recorded those changes, the inspector general found.
The findings come after months of scrutiny over the accuracy of crime statistics in the nation’s capital and allegations that serious offenses were sometimes downgraded or improperly classified.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) asked the Office of the Inspector General in December to examine those allegations. Rather than duplicate investigations already underway by Congress and the U.S. attorney’s office, the inspector general focused on a different question: whether the police department had adequate safeguards to ensure its crime statistics were accurate.
Investigators concluded that it did not.
The report does not determine whether MPD deliberately falsified crime statistics or whether previously published crime totals were inaccurate. Instead, it found that the systems designed to prevent and detect such problems had deteriorated over more than a decade.
“The Staff Review Unit, MPD’s independent review function that served as the system’s quality check, was disbanded and never replaced,” investigators wrote. The department’s records system transitioned without a documented process governing user permissions, policies became outdated and the division charged with identifying organizational risks never assessed the accuracy of crime reporting.
MPD agreed with all five recommendations made by the inspector general and said it has begun making changes, including establishing an Office of Data Integrity and Analytics and a branch dedicated to auditing police reports.
The department expects officers and sergeants assigned to the new review operation to begin examining reports by mid-to-late August and says the function should be fully operational by the beginning of next year.
