What Caused the D.C. Crime Wave?
“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.”
https://reason.com/2024/06/08/what-caused-the-d-c-crime-wave/