WASHINGTON — Homicides in the nation’s capital dropped an eye-popping 60%, while carjackings took a nosedive of 68%, and overall crime dropped 32% when comparing the end of 2024 to 2025, US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro touted on Tuesday.
Pirro credited President Trump’s crackdown on Washington, DC, for the remarkable plunge in crime, while acknowledging trouble with a 59% spike in strangulation that her team is working on addressing.
“The story begins with the impact of President Trump’s executive order [on] making DC safe and beautiful,” Pirro, who began her job last May, told reporters during a press conference. “It is incredible.”
Her team clarified that the comparison is between August-December 2024 and August-December 2025 to illustrate the benefits of Trump’s surge of resources to DC to combat crime.
The timeframe she used shows an even more dramatic plunge in crime that comparisons between the full year of 2025 vs 2024, during which homicides fell 32% and total crime sunk 17%, per data from DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.
That dip in crime last year came on the heels of violent crime in DC hitting a 30-year low at the end of 2024. But Pirro was skeptical of the prior data.
“As most of you know, there were some issues with the stats from MPD, which actually, as we reflect on it, make it clear the crime is down more than we even thought, because crime was really higher than they were actually reporting,” Pirro cautioned.
Last year, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee published a report alleging that the MPD’s data on crime in DC was rife with flaws and undercounted various types of lawbreaking.
Pirro was confident that the recent numbers for 2025, showing a massive decrease in crime during her brief tenure as DC’s top federal prosecutor, are legit.
“Next week, [we are] going over the MPD and working with them on all of the classifications of the crimes, how it’s being done,” she told The Post when asked about why she trusts the data now. “There is a new chief now. I am very comfortable with what’s happening.”
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser tapped Jeffery Carroll as the new interim Chief of Police for the MPD last month.
As for the blemish of rising strangulation on the otherwise rosy crime record on DC, Pirro acknowledged the need to “do more to protect victims of domestic violence.”
“Let it be known to the women in this district that if a man puts a hand on your neck … you are in serious danger, and it is time to leave,” she stressed. “If you have been the victim of a strangulation, there is an 800% chance that he will kill you. It is time to leave.”
“It’s only recently that strangulation was raised from a misdemeanor to a felony,” she added. “We have also done extensive police training on this to let the police know the kinds of questions that they need to ask.”
Overall, the massive decline in DC lawbreaking dovetails with a dramatic drop in crime nationwide, where experts are expecting the single biggest one-year fall in homicides recorded in US history.
Since last August, following the mugging of former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee, Edward Coristine, also known as “Big Balls,” Trump has deployed the National Guard to patrol the streets of DC.
There are currently over 2,000 National Guard troops stationed in DC, per the Pentagon, even after the ambush gun attack near the White House on two West Virginia National Guard members on Nov. 26, that left Sarah Beckstrom dead and Andrew Wolfe wounded.
Trump also briefly took control of the MPD and surged federal law enforcement personnel in the nation’s capital.
“We are prosecuting crime like never before in the District of Columbia, fewer than 10% of the cases go unprosecuted, compared to almost 70% of the cases that went unprosecuted in the last administration,” she said.
She is hoping to push the DC Council, or Congress, which can override local laws in the nation’s capital, to allow for tougher prosecution against juveniles and scrap the Second Chance Amendment Act of 2022, which permits the expungement of certain criminal records.
The top federal prosecutor in DC vowed to keep up the effort to combat crime in 2026.
“To the criminals who thought that DC was an easy target, those days are over,” she declared. “We’re building on the momentum from 2025 with even more resources dedicated to the emerging threats like cyber crime and organized crime rings.”
