Blue Fault Line: DC police were losing manpower for years before end of 'Home Rule'

For years before the federal takeover, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), responsible for safety on the streets of the nation's capital, has for years faced a chronic shortage of officers. Departures are rapidly growing to far exceed recruitment and leaving the force as many as 800 officers short of what's needed. 

The severe shortage of new officers in the MPD has left the department stretched thin while the city faces a public safety crisis, including violent crime rates that outpace many of America’s largest cities. The District has the fourth-highest homicide rate in the nation, "nearly six times higher than New York City and also higher than Atlanta, Chicago, and Compton," according to statistics released by the White House. 

Surge of federal resources

Since President Donald Trump announced he would order a federal takeover of the MPD earlier this month, the administration has surged federal resources to the city, including using agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Park Police, Secret Service and National Guard troops to support law enforcement efforts in the capital. 

The White House says more than 450 people have been arrested since the takeover, including suspects wanted for crimes ranging from murder to assault on federal officers. The administration is touting the surge in arrests as the direct result of its deployment of federal resources.  

Bowser: "Commandeering of the force"

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has scoffed at the Justice Department for touting its arrests since cracking down on crime in the nation’s capital, saying she could do the same if the city had enough police officers.  

“[D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department] takes guns off the street every day and every week, and any time you have a surge of officers, I would expect that you have some results," Bowser said. "I say repeatedly, we need 500 more officers. In D.C. with 500 more officers, get 500 more officers' worth of results.” 

She continued,“What is not necessary, however, is this kind of commandeering or the attempted commandeering of the force itself, and the expanded, I think, work that is not related to violence.” 

Yet, the city, with Mayor Bowser at the helm since 2015, has so far been unable to reverse the years-long trend of a shrinking metropolitan police force, a review of the department’s public employment data shows. 

District accused of underreporting or manipulating crime stats

The officer shortfall comes as D.C.'s violent crime rate remains among the highest in the United States and amid accusations from the police union and the president that law enforcement in the city is chronically undercounting the true crime statistics. 

The president’s political opponents and city leadership cited those official numbers, which show an approximately 30% decline in violent crime since 2023, as evidence that the federal takeover was unnecessary. However, there is a growing body of evidence—from a whistleblower lawsuit, union statements, and ongoing disciplinary proceedings—that call those official numbers into question, Just the News reported on Monday. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia launched an investigation into allegations that the city’s crime statistics had been manipulated. 

Bleeding Blue: More officers leave each year

The most recent July 2025 Staffing and Attrition Report published by the MPD shows the department has consistently lost more officers to retirement, resignation and other causes than it has been able to recruit since 2019, the earliest year referenced in the report. 

The disparity between hires and departures has grown increasingly stark since 2021, when the department only hired 103 new officers while more than 300 left, with many retiring or resigning voluntarily. In total, from 2022 to the present day, separations have outpaced hires by nearly 400 officers, the data show.

Last year, the total number of officers on the force stood at 3,215—nearly 800 short of the goal of 4,000 set by the mayor’s office in 2022. Each year when the department loses officers, it gets further away from that goal.

The D.C. police union, which represents the officers in the MPD, placed the blame on flagging morale stemming from criminal justice reform attempts. Several laws passed by the D.C. council in recent years have made it harder for police officers to do their jobs, the union says.  

Changes in laws, enforcement needed

The chairman of D.C.'s police union said that the emergency federal assistance to the district is only a temporary fix for the chronic shortage. He called on the city to change those laws in order to begin reversing the department’s decline.  

“The staffing level in the police department is beyond crisis,” said Chairman Greggory Pemberton, according to local news outlet ABC 7 News. 

“The President's authority only lasts 30 days, and I think we all know at the end of those 30 days, these federal agents and these National Guardsmen are going to pack up and move along, and if, in that interim, we're not doing something about the root causes, which is this bad legislation that's passed by the Council, the MPD is going to be left holding the bag,” said Pemberton. 

“We're still going to be short 800 officers. We're still not going to be able to handle crime, and the crime rate's going to continue to creep back up,” he added. 

Multiple changes to D.C.’s criminal codes and oversight of the police department since 2018 are also being targeted by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, which she blames for the spike in offenses committed by juveniles, which the city classifies as those under 25-years-old. 

Pirro: Lenient laws at fault

One of the laws identified by the U.S. Attorney, the city’s 2018 Youth Rehabilitation Act, raised the age limit for juvenile offenders from 22 to 24 years old, six years beyond the widely-recognized legal age of 18. The law also allows judges to ignore mandatory minimum sentences for defendants under the age of 25. 

In 2022, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and subsequent riots in the city, the D.C. Council passed two sweeping police reform bills that restricted the "use of force" policies, restricted vehicular pursuits, mandated officer names and camera footage be released quickly after any officer is named in a "use of force" incident. 

The laws also restricted union involvement in the department’s disciplinary processes. 

“Without delving into the granular details of how terrible these bills are, or how blatantly awful the rhetoric used by the council was, I can assure the members of this Committee that the direct result was a mass exodus of police officers from the department,” Union Chairman Pemberton told Congress in 2023. 

The mayor also admitted at the time that these same reforms were pushing officers out of the department. 

“We have to have a policy environment that allows us to recruit and retain officers and not lose our officers to surrounding jurisdictions because our policy environment makes them scared to do their job,” Bowser said at a press conference that year. 

Ultimately, the D.C. Council voted to roll back some, but not all, of those reforms. 

Morale issues

But years of declining numbers could create a death spiral difficult for the MPD to escape. A dozen current and former officers told the DCist website in 2023 that, in addition to a growing hostile attitude towards police officers, many chose to leave because of the burnout that comes from working long hours, partly a symptom of the lack of manpower on the force. 

Officers recounted excessive mandatory overtime to cover for the lack of manpower, especially during the years of heavy protests and COVID-19 lockdowns that played a major part in their decision to leave. 

“The department doesn’t care about you and your family. It’s all mission-focused, mission-focused only,” one officer named Larry, who retired in 2020, told the DCist. 

An independent study commissioned by the MPD in 2023 to assess the department’s culture confirmed these concerns. The report, which was authored by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, found after surveying officers that “two of the greatest contributors to low morale are canceling employees’ days off and requiring them to repeatedly work overtime, often without prior notice.”