On Monday, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser credited District leaders’ embrace of a more aggressive approach to crime fighting with helping to drive down a generational spike in violence, focusing attention on an issue that last year drew public outcry and led Congress to block local legislation, the Washington Post reports. Bowser (D) at a news conference pointed to a dramatic downturn in crime rates as proof city leaders had “rebalanced” public safety in the District through a series of strategic choices. Violent crime is down 35 percent compared with this time last year, according to D.C. police data — a decrease that mirrors nationwide trends. Last year was the District’s deadliest in more than two decades, even as violent crime fell in other major U.S. cities. Experts in interviews cautioned against linking fluctuations to recent policy changes, saying it is too soon to know what happened. Still, Bowser said the progress has been a focus of her outreach to the transition team for President-elect Donald Trump, who at a rally in Florida this summer pledged to “rebuild our capital city so that it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.”
Last year’s surge in violence traumatized residents across the city and was felt most acutely in predominantly Black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. A flurry of legislation and government initiatives followed. So did sparring between the council and Congress over a revision to D.C.’s criminal code that saw the House and Senate overturn local legislation for the first time in more than 30 years. Ultimately, the D.C. Council passed, at Bowser and Chief Pamela A. Smith’s urging, emergency crime legislation last summer that stiffened gun penalties and expanded pretrial detention for some violent crimes — and then followed up in March with another version of the bill, which also broadened the definition of carjacking with the goal of making it easier to prosecute. The level of violence is a far cry from what the city saw in the 1990s, when D.C. routinely saw more than 400 killings a year. After hitting a low of 88 in 2012, the last decade saw a broad uptick, with a sharp spike during the pandemic that saw more than 200 people killed in D.C. each of the years between 2021 and 2023. Homicides this year are on pace to be lower than they were in 2020, but higher than they were in 2019, according to data provided by the Bowser administration Monday. Overall, violent crime this year is down 16 percent compared with pre-pandemic numbers, Smith said Monday. Patrice Sulton, executive director of the left-leaning criminal justice advocacy group DC Justice Lab, said the factors behind the drop in crime are complex and could not be attributed to the Bowser administration’s alone. “It’s important to understand that there were predictably upticks in crime as a result of the pandemic, and other jurisdictions turned that around much more quickly than D.C. did,” she said. “We’re seeing some of the natural return to the numbers that we had before the pandemic.”
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