Well before President Donald Trump put a national spotlight on the public safety crisis in Washington, D.C., the capital’s police force faced a chronic scarcity of officers due to Democrat-championed policies driving out officers in droves.

For years, departures from the district’s Metropolitan Police Department have annually outpaced recruitment rates, which include new hires, cadet rollovers, lateral moves, and reinstatements.

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Since at least 2019, more MPD officers have retired, resigned, or left the force for other reasons, such as termination, death, or disability, than the department has been able to recruit, according to a recent staffing and attrition report. To date, separations cumulatively surpass enlistments by 674 sworn officers.

Over the past seven fiscal years, MPD has seen 2,189 officers leave the force. Resignations alone account for 757, or a third, of the total departures.

1. As of July 31, 2025 ↩︎

The numbers are newly relevant amid a debate over DC’s home rule and crime rates in the nation’s capital. Trump took over MPD using federal emergency powers last month, citing a public safety crisis he says local leadership failed to solve.

The disparity between MPD’s hiring levels and exits peaked in fiscal 2021 following local anti-police protests and calls to defund MPD. That year, MPD hired only 103 officers while parting with over 300 police personnel, nearly a 220-officer deficit. A majority of them left voluntarily, whether via resignation or retirement.

The current number of active MPD officers stands at 3,076, not including 100 or so incoming recruits, which is still about 800 short of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s goal of 4,000 sworn officers, which she set in 2022 as part of a $30 million plan to ramp up recruitment.

Bowser, seeking a third term at the time, had proposed several budgetary changes she hoped would help incentivize onboarding and retention within the MPD, after the city significantly slashed the police budget by about $15 million in 2020.

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The mayor’s reinvestments included hiring bonuses, temporary housing stipends for recruits living outside the city limits, expansions of the vehicle take-home program, and tuition reimbursements.

Three years later, MPD has not met Bowser’s employment target nor come anywhere close to it. The last time MPD had 4,000 officers on hand was over a decade ago in 2013. The steady depletion of MPD personnel has led to the district’s lowest number of law enforcement officers since the 1970s.

MPD’s severe staffing shortage, the result of the department consistently hemorrhaging manpower each year, especially in 2021, was brought about in part by progressive Democrats’ reforms to the police department.

In 2022, through the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act, the Democrat-majority D.C. City Council voted to claw back collective bargaining procedures, pertaining to union involvement in the disciplinary process against MPD members, and due process rights for officers facing corrective action.

Congress passed H.J. Res 42 in response to nullify the council’s criminal justice reform bill, but former President Joe Biden vetoed the joint resolution, calling CPJRAA “commonsense” legislation.

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In this legislative session, House Republicans introduced the Protecting Our Nation’s Capital Emergency Act of 2025 (H.R. 2096), which would rescind the changes governing the discipline of MPD officers.

If enacted, two provisions of the bill will reinstate a 90-day statute of limitations for initiating “corrective or adverse action” against any MPD officer and allow punitive matters to be negotiated under a collective bargaining agreement.

This lack of professional protections for officers is regularly cited as the top motivator for why officers are leaving the MPD, according to the D.C. Police Union, which represents the force’s rank and file. Reinstating the 90-day disciplinary timeline, in particular, would eliminate prolonging the process as a means of additional punishment, the union says.

In congressional testimony addressing abysmal morale department-wide and the mass exodus of MPD officers, the police union’s chairman, Greggory Pemberton, cited a series of soft-on-crime laws that the D.C. City Council advanced in the wake of the 2020 racial justice riots, as well as perceived anti-police attitudes among local lawmakers.

Among the sweeping reforms, the Democratic overhaul restricted police practices regarding use of force, imposed restrictions on vehicular pursuits, and mandated the immediate release of an officer’s name after a use-of-force incident, all of which have made it harder for officers to perform their duties, according to Pemberton.

Pemberton also pointed to a council member saying at a public hearing that “bad actors” in the MPD ought to receive “some kind of retribution” or “proper penance.” Additionally, the union boss referred to Councilor Charles Allen, a Democrat, bragging about budget cuts causing the department’s “numbers…to drop by about 200 officers.” Allen added, “This is the biggest reduction to MPD that I’ve ever seen.”

“Without delving into the granular details of how terrible these bills are, or how blatantly awful the rhetoric used by the council was, I can assure the members of this Committee that the direct result was a mass exodus of police officers from the department,” Pemberton, then an 18-year MPD veteran, told Congress.

Bowser herself has admitted that the current workplace culture frightens officers who patrol the streets of D.C. and thereby hinders their ability to respond effectively to crime.

“We have to have a policy environment that allows us to recruit and retain officers and not lose our officers to surrounding jurisdictions because our policy environment makes them scared to do their job,” Bowser said at a 2023 press conference.

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That year, a dozen current and former officers told the DCist that many MPD members have called it quits because of burnout from working overtime to compensate for the lack of manpower. “It makes you just feel kind of like some tiny cog in a broken machine that’s not working,” said one officer, who left the MPD to join a suburban-area police department.

An independent study conducted on behalf of MPD leadership to assess the department’s culture discovered similar concerns in 2023. After surveying a number of MPD officers, the research report found that “two of the greatest contributors to low morale are canceling employees’ days off and requiring them to repeatedly work overtime, often without prior notice.”