The post went up just before eleven on Sunday night, one line in a long thread: '60 monuments and fountains have been cleaned and fully renovated in D.C., and crime is at record lows! Washington has never looked better, or been safer!' [1]. The monuments are a matter of record. The crime claim is checkable against the police department's own numbers, and it does not hold up.
The Metropolitan Police Department publishes a running comparison of this year's crime to last year's, updated daily. As of July 13, it showed total violent crime slightly higher than a year earlier - 1,421 offenses in 2026 against 1,405 in 2025, up 1 percent [2]. A number sitting above last year's is not one sitting at a record low.
The picture underneath is genuinely mixed, and the mix is the story. Homicides fell sharply, to 55 so far this year from 90 by the same date in 2025 - down 39 percent [2]. Robberies dropped 18 percent. Running the other way, assaults with a dangerous weapon climbed from 459 to 661, up 44 percent, and it is that surge, more than any decline, that lifted the overall violent-crime count above last year's [2].
Data
| Homicides, 2025 | 90 reported offenses |
|---|---|
| Homicides, 2026 | 55 reported offenses |
| Aggravated assault, 2025 | 459 reported offenses |
| Aggravated assault, 2026 | 661 reported offenses |
Two of those numbers are real wins, and a city with 35 fewer homicides is safer for the families who would have been on the other side of them. The post did not say homicides fell, though. It said crime is at 'record lows' and the city has 'never... been safer' - a claim about the whole, made at a moment when the whole is up and aggravated assaults are up nearly by half [1][2].
Property crime does tell a cleaner story, down 23 percent, from 11,920 to 9,190 [2]. A precise version of the boast would say exactly that: homicides and robberies down, property crime down, aggravated assaults sharply up, violent crime overall a shade higher than a year ago. 'Record lows' and 'never safer' are the two descriptions the department's own dashboard will not carry [1][2].
