The numbers told a comforting story — but the streets told a different one.
Fresh revelations are raising questions about whether Washington, D.C.’s crime statistics were polished for public consumption during the final stretch of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s leadership, masking the true state of public safety in the nation’s capital.
Those allegations took center stage on OAN’s Real Story, where Eric Eggers, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute, joined host Riley Lewis to break down what he called a troubling pattern of crime data manipulation.
Eggers pointed to a House Oversight Committee report accusing D.C. police leadership of downgrading felony crimes, allegedly to artificially lower violent crime rates and improve the city’s image.
According to Eggers, when serious crimes are reclassified, the consequences ripple outward — reality is distorted, repeat offenders are shielded, and public trust erodes. Communities, he argued, pay the price when statistics are treated as political tools rather than public warnings.
He suggested the practice may extend beyond Washington, arguing that similar tactics appear in other Democrat-led jurisdictions, where optics can outweigh transparency.
“This is part of a much larger problem. It’s not just the Washington D.C. police force, unfortunately. It’s the administration of several programs under the Biden administration and the Obama administration,” Eggers said. “This is a national problem within the Democrat Party and Democrat led areas. Washington, D.C., not the least among them. But it’s especially galling in Washington, D.C., that Muriel Bowser has her police force lie about crime stats.”
Eggers also framed Bowser’s exit from office as an attempt to sidestep accountability, rather than reckon with the fallout from leadership decisions affecting law enforcement and public safety.
“She’s going to try to recast her legacy, now. But I think most people in the history books will remember a very
different story than the one she’s selling today,” Eggers said.
The conversation broadened to the national implications of politicizing crime data, warning that when numbers are manipulated, policy debates are warped and citizens are left in the dark.
“When you have people like Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker saying that more police officers actually lead to more crime, that is so backwards in terms of just being misrepresented of the truth,” Eggers continued. “And so you’ve got people who support policies that bring criminals into this country, bring people with known links to terrorist organizations. And then when the Republicans, as a result, try to send more police officers to those places to try to keep them safer, we’re told that they’re the problem.”
When statistics are bent, Eggers cautioned, the truth becomes collateral damage.
Watch the clip above.
