Crime

Joe Bishop-Henchman | From the July 2024 issue

"It was a very safe city." So said Mike Waters, owner of a pub in D.C.'s long-gentrified Dupont Circle area, in a neighborhood Zoom meeting this past January, neatly encapsulating a seemingly sudden deterioration in public safety.

Violent crimes rose 39 percent in Washington, D.C., last year, including a 67 percent jump in robberies. Homicides increased a stunning 35 percent. Property crime rose 24 percent, with 3,756 motor vehicle thefts in 2022 becoming 6,829 in 2023. The city's 911 system struggled to handle 1.77 million calls, more per capita than anywhere else in the country.

The trend did not spare the powerful. In February 2023, an attacker in an apartment elevator grabbed Rep. Angie Craig (D–Minn.) by the neck. In October, three masked gunmen carjacked Rep. Henry Cuellar (D–Texas) in the trendy Navy Yard neighborhood. And in February, a former D.C. election official, Mike Gill, was shot dead in his car while picking up his wife just off K Street. Business owners citywide deal with brazen thefts.

This did not reflect a national trend. The rest of the country saw a 13 percent drop in homicides in 2023, a reduction evident in many major cities: New York (down 11 percent), Chicago (down 13 percent), Los Angeles (down 16 percent), Atlanta (down 18 percent), Philadelphia (down 21 percent), Baltimore (down 25 percent). But in Washington, crime went up and up and up, peaking in summer 2023 and now declining somewhat but still elevated.

If your image of Washington was shaped by the urban decline of the 1970s, the crack trade of the 1980s, or the municipal bankruptcy of the 1990s, you might not realize that until recently the city has been generally prosperous, growing, and safe. Construction cranes dotted the city as population grew from 572,059 in 2000 to 689,545 in 2020. Neighborhoods that burned in the riots of the 1960s became places to be. Zip codes 20002 and 20003 recently topped the country for new apartment construction. D.C.'s budget went from basket case to record surpluses and rainy day funds, even enabling some income and business tax cuts.

What caused this crime spike? Several narratives are competing, some more compelling than others. One year on, there is now strong evidence of two things that didn't cause it—and two things that did.

Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat now in her 10th year on the job, oversees 40,000 government employees alongside a 13-member D.C. Council (11 Democrats, two independents). The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the local police force, reports to her. But the city is also home to the U.S. Capitol Police, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Secret Service, Park Police for National Park Service jurisdictions, the Metro Transit Police, various university police forces, and even the Smithsonian Office of Protection Services and U.S. Mint Police. Juvenile prosecutions are handled by the local elected attorney general, but adult prosecutions are the job of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate with no involvement by the local population.

The mayor's narrative on the crime crisis goes like this: She's doing everything she can to be tough on crime, but a series of D.C. Council actions since 2016 have changed the public safety "ecosystem"—her favorite word here—for the worse. Among the actions: shifting the focus of juvenile facilities toward rehabilitation (2016), reducing nonviolent offender sentences (2016), changing fare evasion from a criminal to a civil matter (2018), allowing release of adults convicted as juveniles after they served 15 years (2019), prohibiting police chokeholds and removing restrictions on officer discipline (2020), a cut in proposed MPD funding (2021), an aborted effort to pull police officers out of schools (2021), reducing mandatory minimum sentences (2022–23), and easing street vendor licenses (2023). As crime took hold in 2023, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives persuaded Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden to overturn the sentencing reform and officer discipline measures. (Because the District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction, the U.S. government has tighter control over it than it does over other........

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