DC Quietly Settles Lawsuit with Sergeant Who Exposed Crime Stat Manipulation
Starr also said that “managers at the district routinely changed felony classifications to misdemeanors.”
Washington, D.C., has quietly settled a lawsuit from former police sergeant Charlotte Djossou, who alleged that her Metropolitan Police Department superiors instructed officers to downgrade crimes to lesser offenses to disguise the city’s true crime rate. The settlement occurred on August 5, the same day that President Donald Trump warned he might impose federal control over D.C.’s police.
Djossou filed her complaint in October 2020 after serving in the MPD since 2004. According to the legal website HWG Law, she had previously served honorably in the Army and the National Guard.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained and reviewed case documents that included internal MPD emails, depositions, and transcripts of phone calls. In my layman’s opinion, Djossou presented compelling evidence that MPD officials deliberately manipulated crime statistics to make the city appear safer than it was.
According to the Free Beacon, Djossou:
[A]ccused MPD brass of attempting to “distort crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records showing that police leaders explicitly instructed their subordinates to underclassify certain instances of theft to keep them out of the crime stats the city reports to the public.
[Note: Screenshots of the documents can be viewed on the Free Beacon’s website.]
The report includes a transcript from a 2022 deposition of MPD commander Randy Griffin, who oversaw D.C.’s Fourth District during the events in question. In his testimony, Griffin acknowledged that in April 2018, he instructed police captain Franklin Porter to find “a solution for the theft problem which was driving up the district’s statistics.”
Griffin testified that Porter and former MPD lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky came up with the idea to classify certain incidents as “Taking Property Without Right” (TPWOR) instead of “Shoplifting” or “Theft.” Court records indicate that Zabavsky admitted this was done because TPWOR offenses are not included in the D.C. Crime Report.
The plan later became the Fourth District’s operating procedure. On March 12, 2019, MPD captain Sean Conboy sent an email to his officers in which he asked them to reclassify minor thefts as TPWOR offenses.
Djossou reported Conboy’s email to the MPD’s internal affairs office, which conducted a series of interviews with MPD officers “who corroborated allegations that the department had a policy of downgrading charges.” (Transcripts of those interviews ultimately became part of Djossou’s 2020 lawsuit.)
Sergeant Michelle Starr told investigators that there were “emailed directives from the Fourth District management team directing members to use the classification of TPWOR.”
According to a report from the internal affairs office, following Conboy’s directive, the “number of crimes categorized as TPWOR offenses grew 500 percent.”
Starr also said that “managers at the district routinely changed felony classifications to misdemeanors.”
A DC Police Sergeant Exposed Her Superiors for Misclassifying Crimes To Make Stats Look Low — and the City Just Quietly Settled Her Lawsuit.
Former MPD Sgt. Charlotte Djossou, Who in 2020 Revealed Commanders Had Since at Least 2018 Ordered Officers to Downgrade Thefts and… pic.twitter.com/mWt3i8QkFo
— Le Bark News (@LeBarkNews) August 14, 2025
Djossou’s lawsuit alleged that the MPD “also had a policy of downgrading violent crimes.”
In September 2019, Porter sent an email to the sergeants serving under his command, “ordering them not to classify crimes as felonies if they fell under the categories of ‘Assault With a Dangerous Weapon,’ ‘Robberies,’ ‘Burglary,’ or ‘Felony Assault.’ Instead, he directed them to turn the matter over to their on-duty watch commander to classify the offense.”
Porter wrote, “If the Watch Commander is not on the scene then call the Watch Commander’s phone number. I don’t want to be notified that we have a part one [felony] offense in an email.”
Finally, the Free Beacon included a transcript of an October 2019 phone call between Djossou and Conboy. Djossou had just returned from a call that she felt the watch commander on her shift had misclassified.
Describing the call to Conboy, she said a woman had called the police following a “physical altercation with her boyfriend. He strangled her, he ended up throwing her over the couch. She had scratches on her neck, her shirt was ripped, and then he threw a knife in her direction close to her head, she moved out of the way.
“The Watch Commander decided to go with Simple Assault. That’s incorrect,” Djossou said. “I believe it’s an ADW [Assault With a Dangerous Weapon] knife.”
Conboy’s manner was extremely patronizing and he maintained that because the knife missed the woman, the watch commander was correct in classifying the incident as a Simple Assault. “But the knife never made contact with the complainant. … She was unharmed, no injury was caused by the knife being thrown at her. … It’s not an ADW.”
No wonder the city “quietly settled” with Djossou.
No one should be surprised by the settlement of this case. Just last month, a D.C. police commander was accused of altering crime statistics and suspended. The police union claimed his “directive to change offense classifications [came] from command staff.”
DC police commander suspended, accused of changing crime statistics – NBC4 Washington https://t.co/S3lfapi3g7
— Rayne’ (@LibrarianGirl77) August 8, 2025
The Free Beacon reported:
The MPD is one of many police departments to be accused of misclassifying crimes in recent years. The Los Angeles Police Department in 2015 admitted to categorizing approximately 14,000 assaults as minor offenses between 2005 and 2012, decreasing the city’s crime rate by 7 percent. The New York City Police Department acknowledged in 2012 that at least one precinct had systematically underreported crime and hundreds of retired officers said they knew of at least three instances in which the department had done so.
In April 2024, the New Orleans Police Department announced that it had underreported more than 400 rape cases and blamed technical issues in its record system.
In many cities, misrepresentation of statistics leads residents to believe decreases in crime occurred where none existed in reality. Columbus, Ohio, reported a drop in violent crime in 2013 and 2014, but in 2024, citizens learned that violent offenses had actually increased during that time.
Keep this in mind the next time the Left insists crime is falling in D.C. or anywhere else: numbers can be gamed, categories can be changed, and statistics can be crafted to tell a story that reality doesn’t support.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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One has to admire the ingenuity of Americans, particularly those of the DC police. “Griffin testified that Porter and former MPD lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky came up with the idea to classify certain incidents as “Taking Property Without Right” (TPWOR) instead of “Shoplifting” or “Theft.” Court records indicate that Zabavsky admitted this was done because TPWOR offenses are not included in the D.C. Crime Report”. Brilliant! That is pure genius. One can lower the crime rate without the expense and messiness of a large police force. Law enforcement – who needs them? Zohran Mamdani may want to know and apply this strategy to NYC.
Im sure it is applied in NYC already
Some years ago, new Title II directives required college teacher preparation programs to report the percentages of program completers who passed the relevant teacher licensing exams. Rather than report the actual dismal numbers, schools of education quickly redefined “program completers” as students who had completed their academic programs AND passed the relevant licensing exams. Whadda ya know–all of the sudden the rates were 100%.
As I posted before, this downgrading of serious DC crime to improve the stats mirrors what went on in New York City with the Adrian Schoolcraft scandal which was really more serious than what happened Serpico. Schoolcraft was kidnapped by the NYPD from his apartment. They couldn’t arrest him because he did nothing wrong. Instead NYPD had him committed to a Queens hospital. Doctors, in violation of their ethnics, colluded with the police in a Soviet-style medical end run around the law. The Soviets would classify a political dissident as suffering from “sluggish schizophrenia,” a wholly invented diagnosis. NYPD was not nearly as tricky. Multiple politicians, and city agencies were involved. Fortunately nothing comparable happened to Charlotte Djossou.
Only a fool believes government numbers. That includes BLS, the Federal Reserve, the AG Department and of course the two DOEs. It’s all fake. The DOE stuff intersects my skillset and direct knowledge. Hold tight it will all come out.
The adjusted statistics are serving their purpose as Democrats are using them as evidence of authoritarianism or some shit like that 🙄
And of course the Democrat media are right there parroting their every utterance to every gullible low information leftist who’s response to everything Trump does is REsiStaNCe!
Are all large cities completely corrupt? Or is it just Democrat-run cities (which would be almost all large cities)?
The cities can’t help themselves because it is in their genes ( or is it jeans?).
See Dr. John Lott’s work to see that it is not just cities creatively cooking the books.
While this is Washington, Baltimore (just up the road a piece) has a similar mindset.
Baltimore is plagued with “Squeegee Kids” that will run up to your car, “clean” the windshield, and then demand payment. If you fail to pay, the people will damage your car or pull out a weapon, or reach in your car and hit you. The Baltimore Police Department was told not to intervene even though they had a cop on the street where this was happening (it was outside a City owned building.) The teens targeted out of town plates because victims would less likely to come back to testify, but the cops witnessing the crime never made arrests.
In 2023, there was a shooting at the Edmondson Village Shopping Center, which is across from Edmondson High School. Two teens rolled up on a group of 5 kids, shot at them, wounding them all and killing one.
Mayor Scott made a statement at the scene. He did not blame the shooters. He did not blame the kids who had violated the law by leaving school grounds. He did not blame the school SPO’s for allowing the kids to leave. He did not blame the school or the teachers who did not take attendance.
He blamed Popeye’s. As in “Popeye’s Louisiana Chicken.” Seems the kids left school because the food was bad (and the Mayor did not blame the school for lousy food either.) They walked across the street and bought chicken at Popeye’s and were sitting on the curb eating when they were shot.
Baltimore has a law that prevents fast food restaurants near schools from selling to students during school hours. That means a store trying to make a buck is, in the mind of the Mayor, responsible for the kids walking out of the school was not the problem. Not the SRO’s not stopping them, the shooters, or the illegal guns they possessed. The main cause of the shooting was fried chicken.
As a side note, the two shooters were caught. One was tried in 2024. The trial ended in a mistrial even though the prosecution had video of the shooters pulling the trigger. The victims refused to testify for fear of reprisals. And in fact the house of the dead victim was shot up the day the trial started.
Go figure.
One thing that has changed is a new States Attorney for the City. After woke Carolyn Mosby was thrown out of office, people elected a new guy who promised to be tough on crime and prosecute everyone in sight, something that Mosby did not do. Crime is down in the City but the mayor says that is because of his policies and not the prosecution and convictions of criminals.
Fried chicken be racissssss!
Especially from Pope-Yes.
Now, if a wooder melon stand was nearby, that may be different.
Wouldn’t surprise me if Mayor Scott himself didn’t begin his Baltimore career as a “squeegee kid”.
Perfect example on why people leave the state.
Isn’t the alteration of reality the Liberal answer to everything?
I know the instant stories relate to police, but isn’t this phenomenon largely restricted to cities run by Dems? Don’t police chiefs take policy direction from the civil government? A Dem mayor would never respond to rising crime with, “Chief, I want you to crack down on criminals.” A Dem mayor would say, “Chief, I want you to change these statistics, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.” How would the chief of a PD in a Dem-run city take such a directive? If he understood it to mean “crack down on criminals,” he’d probably soon find himself out of a job.
Golly gee whiz, what a surprise. I sure hope none of the Federal Funding was used directly or indirectly to facilitate these stats to show progress or meet benchmarks to qualify for even more funding or even, gasp, to make the City’s political leadership look good by deceiving voters over this timeframe. Gotta investigate each crime report decades back to see if it was massaged into a better statistical category for political purposes which is almost certainly a violation of some sort of campaign laws. If only there was a local Federal Agency with the expertise to do that… oh wait; Joint TF of DoJ and FEC to review and discover the value of the ‘in kind’ contributions and whether they were declared as required. Lawfare is fun!
Need a soft takeover. Let DC leaders stay in nominal power but remove authority to a Congressionally appointed ‘master’ (won’t that make folks uncomfortable) who wields oversight and ultimate decision making on hiring/firing and sets policy, rulemaking, ordinances, statutes subject to Congressional review to make sure they don’t go off the rails. Then Congress can still have someone to blame if it doesn’t work and DC might just become safer, better run and better managed.
None of this was a contribution to an election campaign, which is the only thing that is regulated and must be reported. The FEC has no authority over anything but campaigns. (And of course it only has authority over federal campaigns, not that that’s relevant here.)
They’re all rotten to the core. Most have probably always been rotten to the core. These jobs are setup to attract such people and the worse people are those hiring.
And how many crimes are not even reported to the police because people are convinced that the police won’t do anything? Crime stats are absolutely meaningless.
I am yet to be convinced that murder stats, as a proxy for all violent crimes, are meaningless.
why she isnt being lionized is a testament to our lack of power
why arent abortions included in the murder rate??
since suicides ( by weapons) is thrown into the homicide stat
equality is for everyone
Abortions are legal in DC, so of course they’re not in the murder rate. They’re not even in the homicide rate, since unborn babies don’t count as people.
Djossou‘s a heroine, though I’m disappointed she settled.