The Metropolitan Police Department’s long-running crime data scandal claimed its first major casualties Monday, as internal affairs officers fanned out across the department and handed pink slips to commanders whose careers now stand as casualties of a widening federal investigation.
At least three MPD officials received formal termination notices on Monday, according to NBC News4.
The action was carried out by the department’s internal affairs division following an investigation into accusations that crime figures had been deliberately manipulated at the command level.
The morning did not go unnoticed inside headquarters. A conspicuous number of senior officials failed to show up to a scheduled crime briefing, sources said — their empty chairs speaking volumes before a single termination notice had been formally acknowledged.
Commander Michael Pulliam, who oversaw the department’s 3rd District, was among those handed walking papers. Pulliam had been sitting at home on paid leave since July 2025, when investigators first began scrutinizing his district’s crime numbers. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Also terminated was 2nd District Commander Tatjana Savoy. She, too, has rejected the allegations directed at her. A third official, a captain, also received a termination notice.
And those three were not alone — additional personnel across the department were put on notice that firings or disciplinary action were coming their way.
MPD’s interim chief, Jeffery Carroll, offered no public statement, calling it an internal matter. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro similarly declined to address the terminations.
The firings did not arrive without warning. Throughout late 2025, two separate federal bodies had been circling the department with damning findings in hand.
The Department of Justice released a draft report in December 2025 that pulled no punches.
It concluded that MPD’s crime statistics were “likely unreliable and inaccurate due to misclassifications,” and that “violent crime is not being accurately documented and reported to the public.”
The report alleged the department had quietly downgraded the severity of hundreds of crimes, shrinking the city’s official violent crime numbers in the process.
The House Oversight Committee followed with its own report, bearing a title that left little to the imagination: “How D.C.’s Police Chief Undermined Crime Data Accuracy.”
That report alleged that officers who failed to produce sufficiently low crime figures faced humiliation and removal at the hands of then-Chief Pamela Smith.
Smith was named directly in both reports. The DOJ’s findings described a department operating under a “culture of coercive fear that emanates from Pamela Smith,” alleging she leaned on subordinates to ensure the numbers told the story she wanted told.
The Daily Caller had sounded the alarm even earlier.
An October 2025 exclusive, citing sources with direct knowledge of law enforcement operations, reported that suspects were routinely allowed to “wiggle out of … more serious charges” — a practice that reportedly began at arrest and followed cases all the way through the courts.
Those sources described the directives to suppress violent crime reporting as “pervasive from the top, all the way down.”
DC Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton had said publicly in August 2025 that he did not believe the city’s celebrated drop in crime was as real as officials insisted. His skepticism, it turned out, was well-founded.
Mayor Muriel Bowser defended the department in December, pushing back against the federal reports.
“People are very clear about the precipitous decline in crime in the District from murder, shootings, homicides, you name it,” she said, adding that crime classification “is a very complicated business” that “precedes this chief of police.”
Smith announced her resignation in December 2025, framing the decision as a personal one. She left days after both federal reports became public record.
President Donald Trump announced a federal takeover of the MPD at a White House news conference, pointing in part to what he described as “phony” crime numbers as justification for the intervention.
With Monday’s terminations, the department now begins the work of reckoning with what those numbers concealed.
