“In the first decade of the 2000s, the U.S. attorney for D.C. prosecuted more than 70 percent of arrests. In 2016 the percentage began to slide downward, falling below 50 percent in 2021 (Graves took the job that year) and hitting 33 percent in 2022. After some attention was drawn to the decline, the number recovered a bit to a still-low 44 percent in 2023. Felony prosecutions fell from more than 80 percent to about 50 percent in 2022, then rose to 60 percent in 2023. The U.S. attorney declined to prosecute 58 percent of all arrests for theft in 2021 and 2022, which as Joe Friday said “undermined the certainty of punishment for theft in DC.”
Precisely why the prosecution rate has been falling is less clear. Graves has variously claimed that the statistic is unimportant, blamed the crime lab or the MPD, noted that victims do not always press charges, or referenced tough case law or defendant-friendly D.C. juries and judges. But Graves usually offers no explanation at all, even in brazen cases. For example, a man arrested after exposing himself to 24 preschoolers on a public street and bloodily assaulting their two teachers had been arrested three weeks earlier for indecent exposure, two months before that for punching a restaurant employee, the year before that for trespassing, and in 2018 for attempted murder. The system keeps freeing him. Graves has yet to explain why.
But just as the drop in prosecution rate coincided with the rise in crime, the stepped-up prosecution rate after mid-2023 did coincide with the decline in crime. Increased or decreased likelihood of being charged has an impact. David Muhammad of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform said lack of consequences came up “over and over again” in interviews and “needs to be taken seriously.””
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“Now consider the city crime lab. In April 2021, it lost its accreditation and stopped processing evidence for prosecutions. It has yet to fully regain it.
The loss of accreditation came after years of endemic problems, including faulty results, prosecutors interfering with test results, and firings of whistleblowers. The Bowser administration promised to promptly pursue reaccreditation, but it then got bogged down in a dispute with the D.C. Council about whether the lab should be part of the MPD (Bowser’s view) or not (the council’s). That matter was not resolved until June 2023—the peak of the crime surge—and the lab finally regained its biology and chemistry accreditations in December. Firearms accreditation remains in work.
During this entire period, processing of evidence for the MPD and the U.S. attorney has had to be outsourced to other labs, public and private. Many of these labs had little spare capacity, so the result has been backlogs, and probably dropped prosecutions. As of April 2023 770 DNA samples from violent crime cases sat in a backlog. Fingerprint “hits,” one measure of testing, fell from 1,828 in 2020 to 601 in 2022. The number of rape kits tested within three months dropped from 98 percent to 81 percent.
The 2023 crime wave arguably ended the political dysfunction that held up the crime lab’s reaccreditation. But the lack of a functioning crime lab likely contributed to the sense that you could get away with crimes. Prosecutions are hard, after all, without evidence.
Then there’s the MPD. Bowser has attributed some of the crime wave to the long-term drop in MPD staffing, which fell from 4,010 sworn officers in 2013 under her predecessor to 3,337 in 2023. But again, the most considerable drop (in 2021, from 3,799 to 3,580) predated the spike in crime. To identify the more important problems at the MPD, look at what changed for the better when Smith took over.
When Smith took the job in June 2023, the crime spike was already apparent. Word quickly spread through the force that the new chief wanted to see changes. Area commanders were expected to do weekly walks in the community with residents, patrols would be proactive rather than just waiting in cars for a call, and greater efforts would be made to deter repeat offenders. Smith unveiled a Real-Time Crime Center connecting D.C.’s myriad federal police forces with hers. Arrests per officer nudged upward after halving in 2020.
These perhaps feel like obvious actions for a city police force, especially one in the middle of a crime wave. But they were not happening before June.
One lingering issue may be one of the hardest to tackle: The best officers with the most seniority can choose to stay in the “easiest” parts of the city (Wards 1 and 3), leaving the greenest or least proactive officers to get sent to where crime is heaviest (Wards 7 and 8). This leads to skills mismatch and a community sense of being neglected.”
“two other polls found that the verdict has made a small but significant share of potential Trump supporters less likely to vote for him. According to Ipsos/Reuters, 10 percent of Republican registered voters said they were less likely to support Trump after the conviction; HarrisX/Forbes put that number at 11 percent. Similarly, 25 percent of independents said they were less likely to vote for Trump in the Ipsos/Reuters poll, and 28 percent of independents said so in the HarrisX/Forbes poll.”
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“you should take more-or-less-likely polls with a grain of salt; some of those people who say they are less likely to vote for Trump may not have been very likely to vote for him in the first place, and even among supporters, “less likely to vote for” does not mean “definitely will not vote for.””
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“On average, the most recent national polls from the four pollsters who’ve polled since the verdict show a tied race.* That represents a 1-point average swing toward Biden from those pollsters’ pre-conviction surveys.”
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“Interestingly, at least according to these surveys, the shift toward Biden isn’t because Trump is losing support; it’s because Biden is gaining it. On average, Biden’s support went from 42 percent in these four pollsters’ pre-conviction polls to 43 percent after it. By contrast, Trump’s support stayed flat at 43 percent.”
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“Although the fact that three out of the four pollsters showed a shift toward Biden makes us more confident that this is, in fact, real movement, the shifts in both the Ipsos/Reuters and Morning Consult polls were within the margin of error — meaning they could have just been due to random chance. That said, Echelon Insights did something useful: It surveyed the same voters both before and after the conviction, removing the possibility that its 2-point shift toward Biden was due to getting a slightly more Democratic sample the second time around.
It’s also possible that these shifts are an illusion caused by something called (deep breath) differential partisan nonresponse bias. Basically, in the wake of bad news for Republicans and/or good news for Democrats, Republicans may be less excited about responding to surveys and Democrats may be more excited to — which can lead to polling numbers that are a bit better for Democrats than the true state of public opinion.”
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“Even if Biden’s improvement is real, though, another thing to bear in mind is that these are just four polls.”
“”Our key finding was that Black Americans preferred to maintain (or increase) police patrol and spending, and that this preference was not conditional on the described crime rates or policing reforms,” write Linda Balcarová and Justin Pickett of the University at Albany, SUNY; Amanda Graham and Sean Patrick Roche of Texas State University; and Francis T. Cullen of the University of Cincinnati. “Most Black Americans reported that even if crime rates fell and even if there were no new policing reforms, they still wanted to maintain or increase police patrol and spending.””
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“It is well-established that black people are disproportionately afraid of cops, particularly in comparison to their white counterparts. Black Americans are reportedly more than five times as likely than white people to fear excessive force from police. What’s more, a study by three of the same researchers—Pickett, Graham, and Cullen—found that 42 percent of black respondents were “very afraid” police would kill them sometime within the next five years. Only 11 percent of white respondents feared the same thing.
But in their more recent study, they found that such fear coexists, however counterintuitively, with that strong desire to keep or increase police presence and funding. According to their data, 81 percent of black Americans who say they are afraid or very afraid of cops want to maintain or increase police spending”
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“Just as the data make clear that black Americans are more likely to fear police, it is also plainly true that black people are disproportionately the victims of violence. It follows, then, that the people most impacted by crime are going to have strong feelings about abating it however possible. And while police are not always adept at solving crime—in 2022, for example, police cleared about 37 percent of violent offenses reported to them—their presence does have a deterrent effect on criminal activity, which also comports with basic common sense.”
“In the roughly week and a half since former president (and presumptive Republican presidential nominee) Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies related to falsifying records to hide hush-money payments to a porn star, numerous national polls have indicated that voters have moved slightly toward incumbent president (and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee) Joe Biden.
A HarrisX/Forbes poll found Biden and Trump each getting a one-point bump after the verdict. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found a one-point bump for Biden, with Trump losing a point. A Morning Consult poll found a one-point bump for Biden, with Trump neither gaining nor losing any ground. And an Echelon Insights poll found a two-point Biden bump, with Trump support staying flat. (All poll results can be found in a chart here.)”
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“”The verdict has not overhauled the 2024 race nearly as much as Democrats hoped it would,” writes The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “But the totality of the evidence suggests it has dinged Trump a little.””
“Some undocumented immigrants have committed atrocious crimes, but there are many reasons to doubt that recent incidents prove America is suffering a surging migrant crime wave.
Crime is actually down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing operations. “Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles,” NBC reported.
“We don’t have real-time data, but the partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities,” concurs David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “The most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
This aligns with historic trends. In 2015, the Migration Policy Institute found that undocumented immigrants have a lower rate of felony convictions than the overall U.S. population does. Criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin, going off of “more than two decades of research on immigration and crime,” concluded that “communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide,” wrote The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at Cato, found that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate in Texas than native-born Americans do. “Few people are murderers, and illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to be murderers,” wrote Nowrasteh. “We should understand that more enforcement of immigration laws will not reduce homicide rates.””
“It is absolutely true that the right to self-defense is vital. And to argue that Perry—who, prior to killing Foster at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, wrote that he wanted to “shoot the [protesters] in the front and push the pedal to the metal”—acted in self-defense is to make a total mockery of that right and those who’ve had to exercise it.”
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“In July 2020, Perry ran a red light and drove into a crowd of protesters. That in and of itself, of course, is not enough to deduce that he was looking for a fight. His own statements prior to doing so, however, add a great deal of helpful context and show his frame of mind at the time. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” he wrote on social media on May 31, 2020. Also in May, he threatened to a friend that he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” And then in mid-June, he sent that message about going to a protest, “shoot[ing] the ones in the front,” and then careening his car through the hubbub.
This was part of a pattern. Austin police detective William Bursley testified, for instance, that Perry searched on Safari for “protesters in Seattle gets shot,” “riot shootouts,” and “protests in Dallas live.” It is not hard to connect the dots between his searches and messages.
So what about that stand-your-ground defense Abbott alleges the jury nullified? Core to Perry’s case and trial was whether he reasonably feared for his life that July evening. Foster indeed had a rifle on him—because open carry is legal in Texas. The Second Amendment does not solely exist for people with conservative views. The big question then: Was Foster pointing the gun at Perry when he approached his vehicle? For the answer, we can go to Perry himself, who told law enforcement that he was not. “I believe he was going to aim at me,” he said. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” But that is not a self-defense justification, as Perry cannot claim clairvoyance.
That the jury reached the conclusion they did is not a mystery, nor is it an outrage. What is outrageous, however, is that a governor who claims to care about law and order has made clear that his support for crime victims is at least in part conditional on having the “right” politics.”
“a conviction was not inevitable. The legal issues were intricate and in some key respects novel, and some of them will credibly be at issue on appeal. The state’s evidence was voluminous but far from airtight, and there were weaknesses and gaps in the prosecution’s evidence as the case unfolded.
In fact, this was probably a winnable case — not in the form of an acquittal perhaps, but in the form of a hung jury that could have resulted by persuading one or more jurors that a case built around Michael Cohen — the former Trump lawyer/fixer turned convicted felon turned media personality — was simply not strong or reliable enough to warrant this watershed moment in American history. Trump also probably could have gotten off with convictions on misdemeanor counts of falsifying his company’s business records instead of felonies, but he never asked the judge to instruct the jurors on that point, perhaps fearing that the request might make him look weak — the worst offense of them all in his mind.
In life and in the law, hindsight is 20/20. In close political campaigns, analysts are often tempted to treat the eventual winner as the candidate that made the right decisions at the crucial points, and to treat the loser as having fumbled along. The same dynamic applies to legal proceedings too, so some caution is warranted. At some point, we may hear from some of the jurors themselves about what guided their decision, which would be a welcome addition to the historical record.
In the meantime, we are left to our own devices and to a tentative but unavoidable conclusion — that Trump and his lawyers bungled this trial.”
“But aren’t murder rates still far above where they were in 2019? It would indeed seem silly to celebrate that homicides are down from super high to, say, very high. Thankfully, that’s not the case.
“A murder decline of even half the magnitude suggested by the early 2024 data,” writes Jeff Asher, a data analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics, “would place the US murder rate this year largely on par with or below where it was from 2015 to 2019 prior to the surge in murder in 2020.” There are certainly reasons for caution here, chief among them that it is May, not December. The situation could certainly take a turn for the worse. But should the data continue on the current trajectory, then the number of homicides seen in the U.S. will indeed be back to, or under, pre-COVID levels—a concession also recently made by Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.”