Washington Examiner homeland security reporter Anna Giaritelli appeared Thursday on NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich Tonight to discuss allegations surrounding the manipulation of crime statistics in Washington.
Giaritelli, who was assaulted near the Capitol in 2020, said her own case was not reflected in the city’s reported crime data.
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“I was assaulted near the Capitol, and police caught him, put him in jail, he was released the next day, and before we went to trial, he was arrested five more times and was released the following day five times, but after he went to prison, the stat wasn’t counted in D.C. crimes stats,” she said.
“What I was told by D.C. police was, ‘It wasn’t a first-degree assault, and we only count first-degree crimes in the stats,’” she continued.
The D.C. crime stats scandal has included claims of falsified data, as well as cases that were never fully investigated or reflected in reports. Giaritelli said the scope of the issue became clear only after examining how incidents were categorized and reported by local authorities.
“As a federal law enforcement reporter, I had no idea how D.C. police were manipulating the stats to leave it out. I’m still not counting the problem. The problem is just so big there’s still so much work to be done,” she said.
In a statement released on May 5, the D.C. police union said command staff was pressuring patrol commanders to downgrade serious and violent offenses, including assaults with dangerous weapons, robberies, burglaries, motor vehicle thefts, and other crimes, to create the appearance that crime was declining.
MAGAZINE — THE COVER-UP IS WORSE THAN THE CRIME: ONE WOMAN’S EXPERIENCE WITH DC PUBLIC SAFETY STATS
“It’s so systemic. D.C. police, I’ve been trying to reach out to them and Mayor Muriel Bowser for nine months and haven’t gotten any response … the way they treat crime victims is frankly deplorable, and so I decided if I can’t get a hold of them and have a conversation, then all of us are going to go forth together, and so we’ve created a change.org petition. It’s change.org/crimestatcoverup, and you can go sign it and put pressure on not just D.C., but cities around the country,” she said.
Giaritelli dives deeper into these issues in her book Under Assault: A Crime Reporter’s True Story Of Overcoming Sexual Trauma and Exposing Injustice, which tells her story and takes a closer look at rising crime concerns in Washington and questions surrounding how they are documented and reported.
