A veteran Metropolitan Police Department officer alleged in an ongoing lawsuit that law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C., misclassified apparent murders in an effort to artificially deflate the district’s homicide numbers, according to documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, presenting a “danger to public safety” by “allowing murderers to remain on the street.”
MPD sergeant Carlos Bundy, who has served in the department for 28 years and was in the MPD’s homicide unit from 2010 to 2018, alleged police management has been “mis-categorizing deaths as something other than a homicide in order to keep the District’s homicide numbers down.” Bundy said the MPD “purposely misled the public about the homicide rates in the District of Columbia” by “misclassifying unnatural deaths (for example, by labeling them as accidents).” He also claimed his supervisors retaliated against him after he raised concerns about the practice, denying him days off and lowering his evaluation scores, among other punishments.
Bundy’s allegations are similar to accounts from other MPD officers who said department leaders misclassified theft and aggravated assault cases as lesser offenses in order to depress the district’s crime rates. {snip}
The lawsuits appear to bolster claims from President Donald Trump that the D.C. government has pushed “Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety.” The Department of Justice recently launched an investigation into the matter. Last week, Trump deployed the National Guard to “address the epidemic of crime in our Nation’s capital” and said the district is getting safer “every single hour!”
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Bundy cited multiple examples in which MPD officials allegedly classified deaths as “undetermined” or “accidental,” despite having autopsy reports or physical evidence that identified the manner of death as “homicide.” He claimed they also failed to investigate highly suspicious deaths, instead labeling them as non-homicides.
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