The White House misrepresented and exaggerated a recent crime report to overstate the impact of last summer’s federal intervention in four cities, according to a NOTUS review.
On July 23, the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan criminal justice policy organization, released a report on crime in several cities. Days later, the White House cited the report in a news release touting President Donald Trump’s record on public safety. In the release, the White House claimed that the greatest turnaround was seen in four cities where Trump sent federal agency officials and National Guard troops — a claim the data didn’t support. And two of the four cities the White House mentioned — Memphis and New Orleans — weren’t even included in the CCJ report cited in the White House’s release.
The White House claimed that, “The steepest homicide drops have come in cities where the Trump Administration stepped in after Democrat leaders failed to act,” specifically listing Memphis, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. But the steepest homicide drops weren’t in those four cities, according to Ernesto Lopez, the CCJ senior researcher who co-wrote the report.
Lincoln, Nebraska, had the steepest drop. Washington, D.C., had the sixth steepest, Los Angeles the 17th, and Memphis and New Orleans weren’t included in the report.
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The report used data from 36 cities to display the short- and long-term shift in crime that began in the second half of 2022, Lopez said. The authors excluded Memphis due to statistical anomalies. Lopez could not recall if New Orleans had been included in previous iterations of the report.
Supporting data was included in the White House release for Memphis and New Orleans from a separate source, a July Substack article by crime data analyst Jeff Asher. Asher calculated that the Memphis homicide rate had fallen by 43.3% in 2026 from 2025, with New Orleans down 32.1%. (In his 2025 mid-year report, Memphis’ and New Orleans’ murder rates were down 15.1% and 27.4%, respectively, from 2024.) Fort Worth, Texas, had the steepest drop in Asher’s 2026 report, with Memphis just behind and New Orleans in ninth.
On Monday, Asher called the White House’s claim an “incorrect statement.”
“I don’t necessarily think it fully reflects what’s in the piece that I’ve written,” Asher, the co-founder of AH Datalytics, told NOTUS.
“President Trump promised to make America safe again and the data proves he has done just that,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Just today, another survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association found significant drops in violent crime including a more than 17% decrease in murders. Unlike Defund-the-Police Democrats, President Trump will always stand with our law enforcement officers and deliver safer American neighborhoods.”
After sending the statement to NOTUS, the White House published a news release featuring the survey from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, displaying the cities with the largest drops in homicides. D.C. and Memphis were ninth and 10th for the largest drops, respectively, according to an analysis by Axios.
The White House release used the CCJ report as a reference for most of the press release’s takeaways before pivoting away from it to claim cities that Trump sent federal troops to had the greatest change in murder rate.
Homicides are on track to reach a historically low level in 2026, and officials in Memphis and New Orleans have shared credit with Trump. In January, New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick cited the National Guard’s presence as a crime deterrent.
“We’re just grateful that crime is down, and I don’t care who gets the credit,” Kirkpatrick said at the time.
The CCJ report didn’t delve into potential causes for the downward trend. But both Asher and Andrew Wheeler, a crime data analyst who founded the website CRIME De-Coder, pointed to the broader decline that’s been ongoing since former President Joe Biden’s administration.
After a spike that followed the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd protests, crime “has been dropping down pretty consistently across the U.S.,” Wheeler said.
“It isn’t like something that just started like a few months ago or anything like that. It’s been pretty consistent over several years at this point,” he added.
Asher pointed to the Bourbon Street terrorist attack on New Year’s Day in 2025 as an example of how some crime reductions couldn’t be credited to Trump’s actions. The number of people killed in the attack — 14 — skewed the city’s murder rate for the rest of the year, he said. If the attack wasn’t included in the city’s crime data, its 2025 and 2026 murder rates would be similar.
The White House’s release was published during a stretch when Trump’s approval rating has sunk to 38% or lower in multiple surveys, as he deals with the ongoing Iran war that has spurred higher prices in the grocery store and at the gas pump. Given the improving crime rates, the White House has emphasized the issue. A July Economist/YouGov poll found that Trump’s approval on crime outpaced his overall approval rating, 41% to 36%. On Monday, the administration released statistics about crime improvements in D.C. one year after the institution of the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Again Task Force.
Mayor Muriel Bowser said Monday the continued presence of out-of-state National Guard troops in D.C. is “problematic.”
Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he has dedicated significant effort into the beautification of America’s cities. The emphasis birthed the federal task force in Memphis and troops in Los Angeles, New Orleans and D.C., where his infatuation with aesthetics matured into renovations, freshly gilded statues and fixed park fountains.
Although the National Guard remains active in Memphis, New Orleans and D.C., Trump has turned his attention away from sending troops into Democratic-led cities — but the cities remain on his mind. During a speech last week in Las Vegas, Trump said, “The cities stink. They smell. The sidewalks are loaded with horrible stuff.”
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