On August 20, 1866, President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over.
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The War’s End
One theme of The Wire, a series about the war on drugs in Baltimore, is the willingness of police department leaders to fake crime statistics.
Despite a few flights of fancy, the drama prided itself on its realism. It turns out that in reality, too, police department bosses may be willing to rewrite crime statistics so things don’t seem as bad as they are.
In Washington DC, a police sergeant, Charlotte Djossou, accused higher-up officers of repeatedly instructing lower-down officers to re-label everything from thefts to violent assaults as lesser offenses. All liberally confirmed by “[Metropolitan Police Department] emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts” seen by The Washington Free Beacon.
The MPD has now settled with Djossou, who sued the department in 2020 after it punished her for bringing the matter up.
One example that emerged in the legal proceedings is a 2022 deposition by Randy Griffen, an MPD commander. Griffen admits telling a police captain, Franklin Porter, to find “a solution for the theft problem, which was driving up the district’s statistics.” The solution was to recategorize instances of shoplifting and theft, now calling them “Taking Property Without Right” — “because TPWOR reports are not tracked in the DC Crime Report.”
The Free Beacon quotes extensively from court documents. Tweaking the crime stats was routine in DC for years.
The DC Police are not alone: other fictionalizers of crime statistics are known to have flourished in LA, NYC, New Orleans, and Columbus, Ohio.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Whittaker Chambers
A state is as sound as its thriftiest citizens. A social order is sick when it has to tax its thrifty citizen to provide for its poor. When a social order has no other choice but to so, that social order is doomed.
Whittaker Chambers, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” The American Mercury (April 1944), p. 94.
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Patriotism & Protest & Ousting
On August 19, 1919, Afghanistan gained full independence from Great Britain. Earlier, British attempts to maintain an imperial presence in this region elicited an infamous essay in protest by English sociologist and anti-imperialist Herbert Spencer (pictured), “Patriotism” (Facts and Comments, 1902).
On this day in 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was placed under house arrest, a crucial event leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1999, a mass rally of Serbians demanded the resignation of Slobodon Milosevic.
Joe Scarborough threw kindling onto the fire.
In the context of President Trump calling up the National Guard to help police the streets of Washington, D.C. — “you’ll have more police and you’ll be so happy, ’cause you’d be safe” said Trump — Scarborough prompted Symone Sanders, a Democratic strategist, fellow MSNBC host, and wife of a former night mayor of the city, with cedar soaked in kerosene: “You don’t think more police makes streets safer?”
“No, Joe,” she said, helping Morning Joe viewers decipher her racial identity: “I’m a black woman in America.
“I do not always think that more police makes streets safer.”
Before you have time to wonder whether she’s advancing the law of diminishing returns in criminology, she quickly goes on: “When you walk down the streets of Georgetown” — a predominantly wealthy and white D.C. neighborhood — “you don’t see a police officer on every corner but you don’t feel unsafe. So what is it about talking about places like South D.C., right, Ward Eight (if you will), that people say ‘we need more officers to make us safe’?
“I think we have to rethink what safety means in America.”
While adding more police officers to a peaceful society won’t likely decrease crime much, a violent community is another story. People in these communities need greater safety to live their lives. Without becoming a statistic. Law enforcement that is visible on the street can surely help.
But rethinking the meaning of “safety” won’t.
So what’s burning?
Democratic hopes, maybe. We’ll see how Trump’s move to clean up the capital goes.
Yet, if he tries to use the National Guard in other cities without constitutional warrant, that’d go beyond mere policing, into police-state territory.
Just don’t consult Democratic strategists for a “rethink” of such distinctions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Dos Passos
The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The “reality” he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.
John Roderigo Dos Passos (author of the U.S.A. trilogy), “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, September 1928.
August 18, 1590, John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returned from a supply trip to England only to find his settlement deserted. The cryptic word “CROATOAN” was found carved into the palisade of the deserted camp.
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Nineteenth on the Eighteenth
On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.
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How Much of Everything Is Fake?
The tale is repeated every day. A skeptic of the federal government questions a purported fact and is told he is an awful person for believing “alternative facts” or “denying reality.” But how much of our social reality is curated for us? How much is fake? How much of official, government-stamped and -indexed reality is false?
Take crime. President Trump has federal forces taking over the Dysfunction of Columbia — that is, placed the National Guard on the streets, to cut down on crime. Crime in the imperial city is an embarrassment, Trump says — and many agree: visitor and resident and neighbor alike. But the newspapers and news readers on TV say that “Akshually, crime has been down for two years!”
But has it? Really? And if it is down, isn’t it too high? Can we trust the stats?
For example, one way to get lower crime stats is to disengage the police from actual crime, or even effectively de-criminalize crimes against property, as in many cities around the country.
The question of reliability of statistics came up in a recent Trump firing:
Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after she reported weaker-than-expected job growth figures, which he claimed were “rigged” for political purposes. This action raised concerns about the integrity and credibility of U.S. economic data.
Duck.ai ”Search Assist,” August 16, 2025.
We saw a similar response from newspaper headline writers, saying that it is Trump himself who is engendering bad statistics: “Trump firing of statistics chief puts US data credibility at risk, experts warn,” as an early August article in The Guardian put it.
When two sides call each other the same bad thing, it makes it hard to judge. But sometimes we can make good guesses.
There is no small amount of evidence, after all, that much of our social reality has been faked to some degree. Tim Pool suggests that the hit USAID took from DOGE did in progressive media; reputations fell as bots were liquidated and dark money sources evaporated:
As has been discussed by Paul Jacob in these pages, USAID played a vast shell game, distributing fortunes to NGOs and other “non-government” institutions without requiring any accounting. And all that money could indeed have been used to support a dying cause — and radicalizing a minority of moonbats in the process.
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Charles Bukowski
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969).