President Donald Trump declared today that his takeover of DC law enforcement had caused a public safety “miracle” unseen in recent memory: the nation’s capital going a week without a single homicide.
But publicly released data from the Metropolitan Police Department shows that the district previously had multiple stretches of one week or longer without any homicides earlier this year.
“DC was a hellhole, and now it’s safe,” Trump told reporters this morning. “I hate to say this, because it doesn’t sound very good, but there have been no murders in DC in the last week; that’s the first time in anybody’s memory that you haven’t had a murder in a week.”
By the numbers: It’s correct that there have been no murders in DC over the last week, according to preliminary crime data published on the MPD’s crime database as of this morning. Two murders have taken place since Trump signed his executive order wresting control of the police department: one in the evening of August 11, the same day the order was signed, and another on August 13.
A week without homicides is not as rare as Trump claimed, however. There were no murders reported from May 4 through May 11, April 11 to 17, and a more than two-week-long period from February 25 through March 12.
There have been a total of 89 homicides so far in 2025, according to the district’s data.
In some cases, murders are confirmed and added into the public MPD database weeks or months after they occur, so it’s possible that additional cases will be added.