The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics, court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Police brass repeatedly told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, according to internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts the Free Beacon reviewed.
Former MPD sergeant Charlotte Djossou sued the department in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. Djossou, who joined the force after serving honorably in Iraq, accused 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.
The lawsuit, as well as the city’s decision to settle, calls into question the prevailing narrative presented in mainstream media outlets as President Donald Trump carries out a D.C. crime crackdown. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico have all cited data from the Metropolitan Police Department to contend that D.C. crime is low and Trump’s crackdown is unnecessary. That coverage did not mention whistleblowers like Djossou, nor did it disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats.
Though elements of Djossou’s case have previously been reported, the settlement has not. Neither have several exhibits the legal proceedings brought to light, including a 2022 deposition of MPD commander Randy Griffin. At the time of the events in question, Griffin oversaw D.C’s Fourth District in the northernmost part of the city. He confirmed in his deposition that he tasked a police captain, Franklin Porter, with finding “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics” in April 2018.
Porter’s solution, devised alongside former MPD lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky, was to use the “Taking Property Without Right” (TPWOR) classification instead of “Shoplifting” or “Theft,” Griffin confirmed in the deposition. Court records show that Zabavsky—currently serving a 48-month sentence for covering up an unrelated murder case—”acknowledged this was done because TPWOR reports are not tracked 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 the misclassification to MPD’s internal affairs office, which opened an investigation later in 2019. The investigative report, included in the lawsuit, contained transcripts of interviews with several officers who corroborated allegations that the department had a policy of downgrading charges.
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The department also had a policy of downgrading violent crimes, according to the lawsuit, with the report noting that Starr informed investigators that “managers at the district routinely changed felony classifications to misdemeanors.”
Porter, one of the two officers who came up with the TPWOR strategy, sent a September 2019 email to the sergeants serving under him 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.
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