Anna Giaritelli believes that Crime Cards’ omissions can put civilian well-being at risk.
Reporter Anna Giaritelli is leading the charge against the alleged manipulation of crime statistics in Washington, D.C., after her own assault went unreported in the city’s publicly accessible crime database, Crime Cards.
Giaritelli was sexually assaulted in broad daylight while walking outside Union Station in April 2020. The assailant was arrested but promptly released from jail the next day because of limited space. While awaiting trial, Giaritelli noticed that record of her assault was missing from the database, despite the arrest’s having been processed and the database’s being updated regularly.
Concerned, Giaritelli reached out to the D.C. police department to find out where the crime against her was recorded. “They told me, ‘We only put first-degree felonies on the crime map.’ And my case was brought up as a third-degree felony,” she told National Review. “What they’re saying is that most of these second- and all of these third-degree sexual assaults will not be on the map.” The map website today confirms this in its fine-print section.
Washington, D.C., is a federal district, which means criminal cases are processed through the United States Attorney’s Office. To Giaritelli, this presents an obvious double standard. “It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “Why does it matter enough for the largest government in the world to prosecute this case, and to send him [the perpetrator] to federal prison, but it’s not even a blip on the D.C. police crime map?”
Giaritelli is most concerned about the safety risks that the omission of crime data poses for civilians like herself. “There’s going to be many, many more second-degree or third-degree crimes that people are going to go to prison for, but the public just won’t know about them,” she told NR. “I had moved to Capitol Hill and looked at the Crime Cards map because I wanted to know where the best blocks were to live. And after getting assaulted near my home, it was such a blow to learn that I had chosen my specific apartment building because of the location, thinking it was safer than others only to find out the map isn’t even accurate to start with.”
The issue could take time to solve, given a recent crime-data-manipulation scandal in the D.C. police department and the lack of a greater political incentive to make the missing data available. “If I’m the White House, or the mayor’s office, I don’t want the crime stats to be accurate tomorrow because then overnight, it’s going to look like D.C. crime went way up now, because we’re counting everything,” Giaritelli says. “But the solution is integrity for the long term, where we can acknowledge where crime actually stands and address it appropriately.”
Giaritelli started a petition to enact these changes that received almost 19,000 signatures, and she has since published a book covering her story and continued efforts to protect the integrity of D.C. crime reporting.
The current mayoral race, in which Janeese Lewis George is expected to win the Democratic primary, presents an avenue to advocate pretrial detention, which could have prevented Giaritelli’s assault. The perpetrator had previously assaulted an off-duty female police officer, and in the yearlong process leading up to the trial was arrested five more times before taking a plea deal and serving two and a half years in federal prison. “Pretrial detention means that offenders can’t make new victims. Pretrial detention would have avoided those five additional arrests,” Giaritelli said. Lewis George has expressed concern over expanding pretrial detentions, citing the traumatic effect such detentions could have on suspected criminals.