It’s only one account in one conservative news outlet, but it was enough to torpedo a host of Democratic arguments attacking President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime in the District of Columbia.
Anna Giaritelli, a homeland security reporter for the Washington Examiner, went public this week with the story of how she was sexually assaulted in Washington, D.C., back in 2020.
Her account not only backs up conservative contentions that crime statistics in the district are skewed, but shows that most Americans don’t know how bad it really is.
The heart of the issue in Trump’s federal takeover of D.C. policing is Democrats claiming it’s a grandiose power play, unnecessary because the official numbers show crime gradually decreasing.
The common sense response is that the numbers are a sham, and even liberals actually living in D.C. have to deal with it. (Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently made clear that he doesn’t have to deal with it, but then, most Washington residents don’t have an armed security detail, either.)
Giaritelli’s story puts the argument in perspective — and it backs the common sense response all the way.
After describing the crime itself, she reported how her assailant went through a revolving door of re-arrests on other charges but always went free again, apparently to avoid “overcrowding” the district’s jail cells.
He was finally sentenced to prison, but the crime against her is omitted from the numbers on “D.C. Crime Cards,” the Metropolitan Police Department’s online statistics page.
“When I asked MPD in 2020 why my incident was not on its crime map, an MPD spokesman said the city only includes 1st degree felonies under its crime stats,” Giaritelli wrote.
Do you think D.C. authorities are hiding the real crime statistics to keep citizens in the dark?
“That would mean that for every person robbed, assaulted, or sexually abused in anything less than egregious ways, you have not been counted into the total tally. The pain you suffered was not severe enough, according to MPD’s standards.”
Obviously, authorities have a reason to impose some standards on crime reporting — not every infraction is a major threat to public safety.
But just as obviously, authorities whose job performance is measured by the reporting of serious crime have an incentive not to report serious crime, or to report it as less serious than it is, fudging the numbers to make themselves look good.
And what do you know? A police commander in D.C. has been accused of doing exactly that!
Here’s how the Metropolitan Police Department explains its categorization for sexual offenses on the D.C. Crime Cards page.
“In an effort to provide more clear information about the most serious sex assaults that are most closely aligned with the public’s perception of rape and attempted rape, the most serious sex abuse categories are included in the reports of DC Code Index Violent Crimes: Sex Assault,” the page states.
So a man was arrested and sentenced to prison for the crime Giaritelli experienced, but it wasn’t important enough to be counted. Interesting standards.
Giaritelli didn’t accuse the Metropolitan Police Department of breaking the rules, but she outlined just how those rules don’t comport with the reality of D.C. residents living with crime.
“The Left and out-of-touch elite reporters have purported this week that things are fine in Washington because crime is trending down, while the Right has maintained that the Metropolitan Police Department’s statistics have been manipulated to paint a rosier picture of the situation,” she wrote. “Turns out, it is actually worse than they knew.”
It’s a story to remember the next time a big-name Democrat — like, say, Hillary Clinton — decides to weigh in on the D.C. debate.
It’s a story to remember the next time critics in the establishment media attack the Trump crackdown as supposedly unnecessary.
It’s a story that puts a personal face on the district’s impersonal, detached numbers about crime.
And it shows how fake they all are.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
