Democratic Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a federal lawsuit on Friday morning over the Trump administration’s takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD).
The suit came hours after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) administrator Terry Cole as the “emergency police commissioner” of the MPD.
“We are suing to block the federal government takeover of DC police. By illegally declaring a takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its temporary, limited authority under the law. This is the gravest threat to Home Rule DC has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” Schwalb wrote in a statement posted to X on Friday.
In the lawsuit, the D.C. attorney general claimed that Trump’s statements regarding crime in the nation’s capital are “hyperbolic and inconsistent with the facts” and that “publicly available data from both federal and local sources demonstrate that violent crime in the District is trending significantly downward.”
Schwalb then proceeded to cite statistics that were released by the Biden administration’s DOJ on Jan. 3, weeks before Trump began his second term. The DOJ said in a press release at the time that “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years.”
While crime was down 35% from 2023, that comes from a local police data that leaves out crime such as felony and aggravated assault. Aggravated assault and felony assault without the use of weapons are described as violent offenses under D.C. law, but are not accounted for in the police data showing crime.
On the other hand, data released by the FBI shows that violent offenses only went down by 10% in 2024 while the number of homicides have been above pre-COVID (2020) levels, except for 2021 when D.C. submitted incomplete data, according to Axios.
The White House and Brian Schwalb’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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