The number of violent crimes in the District of Columbia increased last year, according to the FBI, contradicting the police department’s claims that violence had fallen substantially in 2008.
The total number of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults in D.C. rose 2.3 percent last year over 2007, according to an annual FBI crime report released Monday. Property crime in the nation’s capital also increased by 4.5 percent, the FBI said.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country saw a better trend: Violent crime nationally fell 1.9 percent nationally; property crime dipped 0.8 percent.
Earlier this year, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, boasted of “huge victories on crime,” testifying before the D.C. Council that police cut violent crime by 5 percent in 2008.
Lanier on Monday discounted the FBI’s numbers, saying they “do not reflect crime for the District of Columbia.”
“Violent crime was down in D.C. last year,” Lanier said.
Council members said they had not realized that the numbers the police department reported to the FBI would show that violent crime was worse than the previous year.
“This is quite worrisome,” said Councilwoman Mary Cheh. “We think we’re doing a lot to tamp down violent crime. And yet if it’s rising, we’re not doing enough.”
Cheh said she’d prefer that the District use the FBI’s classification when reporting its statistics because the Uniform Crime Reporting figures has been the benchmark for decades and is used by the rest of the country.
Lanier said the department has never tried to downplay the FBI’s numbers. But when The Examiner asked for those numbers in June, Lanier vetoed their release. Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the D.C. police union, said the department for years has played with crime numbers to give residents the impression that the city was safer than it really was. “The public has to be able to believe the police department,” Baumann said. “Right now, that’s not happening.” The apparent contradiction is because the District uses two different classifications when figuring it’s crime totals, the D.C. Code and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, according to D.C. police. The systems classify certain crimes differently, police said. Under the D.C. Code, a punch is considered a simple assault; under the FBI’s definition, it’s considered an aggravated assault, or a violent crime, D.C. police said. Staff writer Bill Myers contributed to this report.
Troubled start
>> When Cathy Lanier first took over as D.C. police chief two years ago, she was confronted with an internal review that uncovered 11,000 crimes that were misclassified or not counted. Lanier has said she has brought in new technology to fix that issue.
