By Gary Fields
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Veteran police officer Jeffery Carroll will take over as interim chief of Washington’s police force, Mayor Muriel Bowser said Wednesday, after it was announced earlier this month that the department’s leader was stepping down.
In his current role as executive assistant chief of specialized operations, Carroll is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the department. He was appointed to the position by outgoing police Chief Pamela Smith in 2023.
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Carroll’s profile has risen recently as he joined Bowser at press conferences in connection with the shooting last month of two National Guard troops as they patrolled a subway station three blocks from the White House. Carroll provided details of the shooting during the initial press conference, including that the attack had been carried out by a lone gunman.
As a career MPD officer, Carroll joins a line of other chiefs who have risen through the ranks of the department. Speaking at a press conference announcing his selection, he said he was “deeply honored and sincerely grateful for the trust” being placed in him.
He takes over at a tumultuous time, when members of Congress and the U.S. attorney’s office have questioned how the department keeps its crime statistics. Members of the city council and residents, meanwhile, have questioned the MPD’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts that have rounded up hundreds of people in addition to criminal arrests.
Carroll acknowledged there were critical interim reports in circulation and said the department would be focusing on several steps to address the issues, including improved training for officers in classifying crimes and the creation of an audit team that would examine reports to insure they are properly classified.
Carroll said he wanted a little time before he began taking actions that might reverse policies Smith put in place, including the department’s work in the immigration realm. “Right now I just want to kind of look at the operation,” he said. “We’ll continue to work with our federal law enforcement partners. We’ll continue to not be directly involved with immigration, as we have in the past.”
Bowser said the reports she’d seen on crime data “leave a lot to be desired in terms of evidence and context” and she planned to call in the District inspector general to examine the issue.
Smith, appointed in 2023, had been brought in to stabilize a department facing staffing shortages and a city shaken by post-coronavirus pandemic crime. But her tenure unfolded amid a fierce battle over authority, as Trump asserted federal control over the Metropolitan Police Department and deployed National Guard troops and federal agents alongside the city’s officers.
The 2023 spike in violence prompted congressional hearings and led city leaders to expand police authority, including authorizing drug-free zones in areas with persistent crime. Lawmakers also rewrote parts of the city’s criminal code in an effort to stem the rise in violent offenses.
Early the next year, the city began to see improvement. Overall, crime fell by about 17% in the first 10 weeks of 2024, a drop Smith attributed to the new law and to targeted deployments in neighborhoods experiencing repeated trouble. She also imposed temporary youth curfew zones in several parts of the district.
The change in police leadership comes as Bowser, a Democrat, has announced that she won’t seek reelection next year.
