US President Donald Trump has suggested that crimes "committed at home" should not count in his reduction in crime in Washington, the New York Times reports.
He said his opponents were using news of a "little fight with the wife" to undermine his crackdown.
During a speech at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, Trump made a series of false claims about the crime rate in the capital, where he has ordered a federal takeover of law enforcement.
The president claimed without evidence that there is no crime in Washington anymore. Although crime is indeed decreasing in the capital - and the mayor of Washington credits the greater number of federal law enforcement agencies for this decline - robberies, assaults and thefts still occur daily.
On Sunday alone, there was one murder, six motor vehicle thefts, two assaults with a deadly weapon, four robberies and more than 30 thefts.
"There is no crime. They said, "Crime is down 87%." That's more than 87% - practically nothing," Trump pointed out.
Although the American leader has made similar false claims before, yesterday he sounded particularly bitter that domestic violence crimes were attributed to him.
"Things that happen in the home, they call crime," he noted. "They're going to do whatever they can to find something. If a man has a little argument with his wife, they say that was a crime." His statement quickly drew criticism. "Just a careless dismissal of domestic violence as a crime," Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican political strategist, wrote on social media. The president has often sought to create an alternative reality to crime statistics to support the law enforcement actions he wants to take. He said yesterday that people have labeled Washington as "the worst, most violent city." in America, even though statistics show a large drop in crime in the capital even before his crackdown.
He has also turned his attention to a number of other cities that are reporting a drop in crime, such as Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans.