Is there any chance that a large part of these problems have to do with a culmination of the culture of lawlessness that many of our politicians are fostering? Along with the idea those same people are pushing about being unable to trust the government and the educational system, and the law? I've never lived in a large city, so I'm just tossing ideas from the outside, but it seems like something to consider.
I’m not sure why this piece ends with a list of changes that DC residents have no power or recourse over and then says that DC residents need to fix our system. Certainly MPD could be staffed better, but the prosecutor and courts are not under our control.
Do you live in DC? Our Council just passed a budget to hire more cops and earlier passed tougher crime laws this year. You’re talking about a caricature of progressive policy, which was really only true in 2020, and didn’t have much material impact in DC. And there are real concerns around policing and how Black people are prosecuted and policed, but all of those communities want effective policing and prosecution that protects them. But one big specific issue in DC is that we do not get to elect our prosecutor of local crimes. The US attorney appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate makes all those decisions instead, and the US attorney was dealing with a ton of January 6 cases when he came into office and just didn’t focus on local DC crime. As a results, lots of ordinary violent criminals didn’t get dealt with and that let things spiral more than they should have. Similar issues on the capacity of the courts from unfilled vacancies by Congress. This is one of many arguments for DC statehood. We pay taxes here but we don’t get to fully set the policies that impact us. And members of Congress are here like 3.5 days a week for half the year so they barely care.
DC has been a separate place for over 200 years and Maryland doesn’t want us back. Many other countries have city states including Germany and Japan, both of whose capital cities are also states. It’s a very normal system. DC would have more people than Wyoming and almost as many as several other states. You seem to think just as many directors of noir film that there is some essential rot in DC that prevents its own self governance from working effectively. I just reject that idea whole cloth. DC is not going back to the 90s, we’re fully capable of managing our own affairs ourselves. I don’t care what Republicans or outsiders think. But as you say, it is important to be responsible and do the work of effective government that addresses real problems. And I do think a barrier to that is having as our local prosecutor an official who is not answerable to us and who also doesn’t have to answer to 2 US Senators as every other comparable official does in the country.
I'm a bit confused on how much of this is actually about capacity versus how much is an actual *policy choice*.
Something like the US Attorney choosing to plead cases down to a misdemeanor instead of prosecuting, for example, isn't because the USA's office lacks the ability to prosecute - it's an active choice not to prioritize those cases, right? Similarly, I'm not sure how to tell whether fewer arrests are because MPD has gotten worse at their jobs, or because MPD has chosen not to pursue particular types of crime - and I think that's a really, really important distinction. Does the government lack the ability to do anything about these crimes, or have the actors chosen to do something different?
I think the actual argument Lehman is making reads a lot that the relevant actors have made suboptimal policy choices, and the public needs to hold those actors accountable for their bad choices - which I agree with wholeheartedly! But that's a different argument than the system in DC lacking the ability to do anything about crime (which is what capacity makes me think of).
This is a tangential issue, but I was wondering if the fact that the FBI is in DC affects local police hiring and retention. If you're the type of person growing up in the DMV area who is interested in working in law enforcement and you're also ambitious, you have more chances to meet FBI agents growing up, walk by the Hoover building, etc., which all make a career in the FBI seem feasible. If you're in any other metro area, the FBI is more remote to you, so you may choose instead to work for local law enforcement. Does the presence of the FBI in DC soak up talent that would otherwise go to local law enforcement?
Fun fact - DC is the only city in the world where I got mugged (near the Greyhound union station). It was a scary experience. Fortunately, I had a decent amount of cash on me so I didn't suffer any physical harm. I was afraid that if some other muggers caught me till I reached the metro station, I would get beaten up because I didn't have any money left to give. Fortunately, my $400+ SLR that was inside a bag survived. This was my very first visit to the US, a 3 month business trip from India, almost 25 years ago.
PS: Being the naive foreigner that I was, I told a cop about getting mugged and asked him if he would give me a ride to the metro station. He said - "I'm not a cab driver. Call a cab.". :-)
From your linked report: "Another important component of professional development is education. Cops who are more educated are tactically more effective but are also less likely to use force."
You then use this correlation to argue that MPD should pay to send officers to university.
If the studies you cite haven't disentangled treatment from selection/aging effects, please note that they aren't useful evidence that sending cops to school will help anything except university budgets.
I'd be very leery of recreating the situation we have now with Masters of Education programs for teachers, which have been shown to have no effect on student achievement, and therefore represent an enormous amount of pure waste.
An important consideration is not just how much crime but where it is happening. When people are afraid to drive into D.C. for fear of carjacking or ride the Metro or attend a concert or baseball game, you will hear a far greater outcry than when it's concentrated in historically underserved areas. Case in point: I lived in D.C. throughout its Murder Capital/Crack City days. Although I experienced crime, because I lived in high-crime areas (mostly 14th St. corridor), I never personally witnessed a shooting. My kids, on the other hand, recently witnessed one in the Metro. They've seen repeated police activity at Tyson's, which is starting to look like a war zone with the apparently necessary security presence. Gradually, I'm starting to change my own behavior patterns around a city I've long known and always loved. Yeah, it's all anecdotal, but perception is huge. Especially for an area whose economy depends on workers coming back into town and tourists spending their money here year round.
As a DC resident who experienced the post Floyd/Covid crime wave first hand, I have some thoughts here -
1. MPD's less aggressive enforcement was mainly driven by top down pressure from the District Council. They wanted less enforcement, less pretextual stops, and made it clear they'd legislate that way and were overtly hostile to any proactive policing from MPD. When crime spiked, councilmembers conveniently forgot this part and started asking why "MPD isn't doing their jobs?".
2. I can't find the original source, but I remember seeing something about a policy change at MPD on how they respond to calls. In essence it was that in order to avoid situations where one officer is trying to subjugate a suspect and might have to use increasing force, their policy is to now have multiple officers for every police interaction to cut down on those scenarios. If you drive around town, you'll notice any time MPD responds to something, no matter how minor, there's at least 3-4 squad cars there. This would obviously cut down on arrests if you have 5 officers doing something that 1-2 used to be able to do.
3. As noted, the US Attorney basically stopped enforcement against any misdemeanors. Retail theft exploded when it became apparent that there were no consequences. Drug dealing came back to areas I hadn't seen it in for at least a decade. Judges release known violent defendants back into the community where they continue to commit crimes while awaiting trial. There are some very obvious and easy solutions that could curb crime dramatically here.
4. The city's GPS monitoring of people on release (DC eliminated bail many years ago) is basically fake. It's not being monitored 24/7 and is not an impediment to committing additional crimes.
5. When the city legalized marijuana, it coincided with a complete stop of prosecution for people using it in public (which is still illegal!). It is extremely common to see people driving vehicles while smoking weed, which is bad.
6. Trash pickup got really bad during covid, which was weird because DPW has always been one of the best run city services. It seems to be back to mostly normal now, but its drop off and addition to the general sense of malaise in the city was curious.
7. Progressive activists made a huge deal out of the homeless sweep at McPherson Square and how devastating it would be to the local people experiencing unhousedness community. However now that it's done I haven't seen any follow up showing how devastating it truly was, and the park is now usable for all city residents and workers again, which is nice. Additionally, there was very little backlash from anyone outside of the usual DSA/Anarchist/Lefty groups. I think it showed the city that the activists claimed to speak for many more people than they actually do.
8. Things seem to be slowly getting back on the right track. Fare enforcement on Metro has been popular, the previously mentioned McPherson Square cleanup, and I've even seen an uptick in traffic enforcement. I'm cautiously optimistic that the 2020 collective fever is slowly breaking, and that we can get back to being a world class city.
This is all true. Pre-Covid, especially circa 2017, there was a massive pressure campaign from local activists to limit MPD activity. One way this manifested was the NEAR Act. One thing the NEAR Act did for example was add extra paper work for officers to fill out anytime they made a stop. Also pressure from Councilmembers at oversight hearings towards MPD and the Mayor, basically to cut back on stopping and arresting brown people. Then there were the BLM protests. I’m not surprised MPD would roll back their enforcement activities as a result.
Some people here have noted that the drop in enforcement seems greater than the drop in staff, implying that some police may just be refusing to do their jobs. I have no clue if that's true in DC, but anecdotally it's true in Portland. Or at least to put it more charitably, they feel they've been given mixed signals as to whether or not the city actually wants them to do their jobs. It's another city where the homicide rate has NOT fallen to pre-pandemic levels, even though it's fallen from its 2022 peak. Anecdote: my coworker was T-boned and had her car totalled in October 2022 and the other driver tried to flee but he couldn't because he crashed in to a fire hydrant. The police told her they were only there because the other driver hit the fire hydrant. Even if that's true, that feels vindictive to say out loud. (I heard this information second hand, so take with a grain of salt but I've heard similar stories from others)
I think the reality is that you can either have very aggressive policing towards the small population that is disproportionately responsible for crime (young black men) and take all the horrible collateral damage that comes with that (plenty of innocent black men being harassed and family members of suspected criminals having their houses tossed). This will require policy makers to trust police officers to actually confront dangerous criminals with an eye towards apprehensions while also preventing the officers from dying. This strategy is politically unpopular.
Alternatively we could find a way to prevent so many disaffected black youth from choosing this horrific existence.
Or, we could pump a bunch of money funded by the ideas of "experts" and policy makers into long range government programs that will fail with little accountability while their designers will move onto great luxurious careers in academia, journalism, and politics.
Seems like this mixes two populations together: the extremely criminal and young Black men. There's some overlap, but the former is only a subset of the latter (and also includes some older people, some non-Blacks and maybe a couple of women)
There's enough of an overlap that enforcement that is at all imperfect or sloppy will end up harassing some innocents, but it's not like that can't be minimized or avoided to some degree. And harms to innocents will always occur in policing, or really any enforcement system, it's just draws a special sort of attention in this case because or the disproportionate racial situation and the high-crime levels which make more enforcement attractive.
The overlap is much more like an eclipse than a basic ven diagram. I'm not sure what the percentage of violent disruptive street crime in DC is committed by black males age 15 - 35 but I would guess it's a majority. I've always believed police do their best to minimize harassing innocents, but if I lived in a mafia ridden neighborhood during the 1950s I certainly wouldn't walk around trying to look like a gangster if I were a businessman or out for a date with my wife.
I also wouldn't be surprised and offended if approached by a police officer explicitly tasked with reducing mafia terror. I would expect it.
"committed by black males age 15 - 35 but I would guess it's a majority"
This could very well be true, but it could also be true that only a small percentage off black males age 15-35 are in that crime pool.
The point is if you reactively arrest a suspect for street crime, they are very likely in that BM 18-35 demographic. But if you proactively follow or bother someone in that same demographic without reason, it's unlikely that they are a criminal.
But the police at best can only "proactively follow or bother" a tiny portion of that entire potentially criminal demographic. They need probable cause to do so, which will stem from actual criminal or criminal adjacent behavior. This naturally makes the police activity more focused and efficient on the solving the problem at hand.
A lot of takes want to make this about national issues but some of this is clearly DC specific. Homicides fell a lot in 2022, 2023, and (so far, according to the evidence we have) 2024 in most of the country. This doesn't seem to have been true in DC. But it was true in, say, NYC, which has bail reform, progressive DAs, BLM agitation, etc. NYPD arrest activity is back up too. Gotta look at the local angles
Even Philly prosecutes 94% of arrests. DC prosecutes something like 60%. This is a maybe the most notable disparity, but it’s important to emphasize just how big the gaps are even to other very progressive places.
Those rates sound high to me (if the denominator is "all arrests") but that's my sense too of where a lot of the disparity is. So why is that happening? If Larry Krasner and Alvin Bragg are prosecuting more aggressively the natural ideological story seems less compelling
Worth mentioning that DC has some of the most racially disproportionate crime-related statistics in the nation, with Blacks 6x more likely than non-Blacks to die in a traffic accident, 10x more likely to die of a drug overdose, and 30x more likely to die of homicide. (prior to 2020 these numbers were "only" 4x, 9x and 25x).
So it ends up being the case that enforcement in the city is largely about stopping, arresting and convicting Black people. But AD Graves and progressives seem to have forgotten that it's also largely about protecting Black people.
Previous incarnations of the machine for large-scale violent oppression of Black people were also justified in terms of “it’s for their own good” and “look at what a nice society we can have as a result.” I don’t think that type of argument is going to convince skeptics that this time is different.
I'm not quite sure what specific portion of history you're referencing or what specific solution you think I'm suggesting (I'm leaving it pretty vague mostly because the devil is always in the details). But whichever they are I'm sure you're conflating two very different things with a very thin rhetorical argument.
I think there are a lot "smarter" win-win approaches to reducing violent crime in DC, many of which would simply make DC less of an outlier compared to peers or are capacity-related, like getting their drug lab reaccredited, getting serious house arrest, having their DA choose to prosecute a similar level of arrests as peers, taking truancy seriously, having their city counsel target more arrests instead of fewer, redistributing policing resources away from wealthy neighborhoods to high-crime ones, etc..
A lot of these will involve some level of increased enforcement (some won't), and much of the enforcement will disproportionately "target" Black people, for example getting serious about truancy. And because of that, some people will have takes like "being strict about truancy is equivalent to the violence of Jim Crow".
But I think that's just an utterly ridiculous take. It really is the case that punishing some people is good for society, and even for the people themselves. We have truancy rules in my mostly non-Black school district, for example, and most people think they are a good thing, not a bad one. The skeptics just have to be made to realize they are wrong and their "but slavery punished black people, too" logic is wrong and unhelpful.
Simply observing the disparity (and realizing it plugs into policing controversies) is the easy part. Understanding the drivers is much harder. If I understand you're take on that, I don't think I wholly agree, simply because there are many other populations in the US with similar education / unemployment / HHI that don't have the same set of social problems.
It's not at all clear that education and unemployment drive drugs, crime and careless driving rather than the reverse, or that instead there's some hidden 3rd factor (culture?) that sometimes drives all of them in similar directions.
Just to give some examples: Hispanics in the RGV have high rates of poverty and low rates of education, but El Paso and the Tex / Mex border are low crime / low drug use areas. Or take the area where I live in Western PA, where the White population has been fine on education / poverty metrics but nearly leading the country in terms of overdoses. Or Native Americans on many reservations, who often have terrible poverty and education indicators, but have much lower murder rates than Black people in DC, yet way higher drug and alcohol OD rates (and way higher rates of sexual abuse).
Anyways, the point of listing these out is to try to make the case that it's not always clear what causes what when we see these correlations. If DC suddenly became full of low-ed / skill refugees from Somalia or Pakistan I wouldn't expect them to have the same drug / murder numbers as low income Black people in DC have, as a group, right now.
The thing about DC that’s interesting is DC knows who all these people are. Not kidding, they spent a lot of money identifying the 600 or so people who are most likely to commit violent crime. I feel pretty sure that they aren’t far off either. Now, DC has a very weird problem where they know who these people are, but no real idea what to do about it (I mean they tried People of Promise, and the jury is out, but something like 48 of the people in the program were dead or in jail by the end of the year)
It's wild trying to figure out how far you have to get away from DC to find white working class areas.
There's none in Arlington or Fairfax or Loudoun. Manassas used to be and I guess kind of still is, but is heavily Latino. Maybe Fredericksburg/Stafford? For those note familiar with the area, that's 50+ miles away from DC.
On the Maryland side, the PG County inner suburb white enclaves like Hyattsville and Adelphi basically no longer exist. Bowie arguably the last hold out but is being gentrified by affluent black families. Montgomery County has some bounded by the agricultural reserve like Damascus but mainly you have to get all the way out to Frederick and Hagerstown to find them.
If you’re a cop the deal is (1) it’s basically impossible for your career to be ended and (2) the harder you work, the more people hate you. To quote Tyler Cowen, "solve for the equilibrium".
Shout out to https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/ which covers everything in this article (and much more) in-depth. It's really top-level analysis and probably the best SubStack I know of in terms of completely nailing it's subject.
Is there any chance that a large part of these problems have to do with a culmination of the culture of lawlessness that many of our politicians are fostering? Along with the idea those same people are pushing about being unable to trust the government and the educational system, and the law? I've never lived in a large city, so I'm just tossing ideas from the outside, but it seems like something to consider.
I’m not sure why this piece ends with a list of changes that DC residents have no power or recourse over and then says that DC residents need to fix our system. Certainly MPD could be staffed better, but the prosecutor and courts are not under our control.
Do you live in DC? Our Council just passed a budget to hire more cops and earlier passed tougher crime laws this year. You’re talking about a caricature of progressive policy, which was really only true in 2020, and didn’t have much material impact in DC. And there are real concerns around policing and how Black people are prosecuted and policed, but all of those communities want effective policing and prosecution that protects them. But one big specific issue in DC is that we do not get to elect our prosecutor of local crimes. The US attorney appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate makes all those decisions instead, and the US attorney was dealing with a ton of January 6 cases when he came into office and just didn’t focus on local DC crime. As a results, lots of ordinary violent criminals didn’t get dealt with and that let things spiral more than they should have. Similar issues on the capacity of the courts from unfilled vacancies by Congress. This is one of many arguments for DC statehood. We pay taxes here but we don’t get to fully set the policies that impact us. And members of Congress are here like 3.5 days a week for half the year so they barely care.
DC has been a separate place for over 200 years and Maryland doesn’t want us back. Many other countries have city states including Germany and Japan, both of whose capital cities are also states. It’s a very normal system. DC would have more people than Wyoming and almost as many as several other states. You seem to think just as many directors of noir film that there is some essential rot in DC that prevents its own self governance from working effectively. I just reject that idea whole cloth. DC is not going back to the 90s, we’re fully capable of managing our own affairs ourselves. I don’t care what Republicans or outsiders think. But as you say, it is important to be responsible and do the work of effective government that addresses real problems. And I do think a barrier to that is having as our local prosecutor an official who is not answerable to us and who also doesn’t have to answer to 2 US Senators as every other comparable official does in the country.
I'm a bit confused on how much of this is actually about capacity versus how much is an actual *policy choice*.
Something like the US Attorney choosing to plead cases down to a misdemeanor instead of prosecuting, for example, isn't because the USA's office lacks the ability to prosecute - it's an active choice not to prioritize those cases, right? Similarly, I'm not sure how to tell whether fewer arrests are because MPD has gotten worse at their jobs, or because MPD has chosen not to pursue particular types of crime - and I think that's a really, really important distinction. Does the government lack the ability to do anything about these crimes, or have the actors chosen to do something different?
I think the actual argument Lehman is making reads a lot that the relevant actors have made suboptimal policy choices, and the public needs to hold those actors accountable for their bad choices - which I agree with wholeheartedly! But that's a different argument than the system in DC lacking the ability to do anything about crime (which is what capacity makes me think of).
This is a tangential issue, but I was wondering if the fact that the FBI is in DC affects local police hiring and retention. If you're the type of person growing up in the DMV area who is interested in working in law enforcement and you're also ambitious, you have more chances to meet FBI agents growing up, walk by the Hoover building, etc., which all make a career in the FBI seem feasible. If you're in any other metro area, the FBI is more remote to you, so you may choose instead to work for local law enforcement. Does the presence of the FBI in DC soak up talent that would otherwise go to local law enforcement?
Fun fact - DC is the only city in the world where I got mugged (near the Greyhound union station). It was a scary experience. Fortunately, I had a decent amount of cash on me so I didn't suffer any physical harm. I was afraid that if some other muggers caught me till I reached the metro station, I would get beaten up because I didn't have any money left to give. Fortunately, my $400+ SLR that was inside a bag survived. This was my very first visit to the US, a 3 month business trip from India, almost 25 years ago.
PS: Being the naive foreigner that I was, I told a cop about getting mugged and asked him if he would give me a ride to the metro station. He said - "I'm not a cab driver. Call a cab.". :-)
From your linked report: "Another important component of professional development is education. Cops who are more educated are tactically more effective but are also less likely to use force."
You then use this correlation to argue that MPD should pay to send officers to university.
If the studies you cite haven't disentangled treatment from selection/aging effects, please note that they aren't useful evidence that sending cops to school will help anything except university budgets.
I'd be very leery of recreating the situation we have now with Masters of Education programs for teachers, which have been shown to have no effect on student achievement, and therefore represent an enormous amount of pure waste.
An important consideration is not just how much crime but where it is happening. When people are afraid to drive into D.C. for fear of carjacking or ride the Metro or attend a concert or baseball game, you will hear a far greater outcry than when it's concentrated in historically underserved areas. Case in point: I lived in D.C. throughout its Murder Capital/Crack City days. Although I experienced crime, because I lived in high-crime areas (mostly 14th St. corridor), I never personally witnessed a shooting. My kids, on the other hand, recently witnessed one in the Metro. They've seen repeated police activity at Tyson's, which is starting to look like a war zone with the apparently necessary security presence. Gradually, I'm starting to change my own behavior patterns around a city I've long known and always loved. Yeah, it's all anecdotal, but perception is huge. Especially for an area whose economy depends on workers coming back into town and tourists spending their money here year round.
As a DC resident who experienced the post Floyd/Covid crime wave first hand, I have some thoughts here -
1. MPD's less aggressive enforcement was mainly driven by top down pressure from the District Council. They wanted less enforcement, less pretextual stops, and made it clear they'd legislate that way and were overtly hostile to any proactive policing from MPD. When crime spiked, councilmembers conveniently forgot this part and started asking why "MPD isn't doing their jobs?".
2. I can't find the original source, but I remember seeing something about a policy change at MPD on how they respond to calls. In essence it was that in order to avoid situations where one officer is trying to subjugate a suspect and might have to use increasing force, their policy is to now have multiple officers for every police interaction to cut down on those scenarios. If you drive around town, you'll notice any time MPD responds to something, no matter how minor, there's at least 3-4 squad cars there. This would obviously cut down on arrests if you have 5 officers doing something that 1-2 used to be able to do.
3. As noted, the US Attorney basically stopped enforcement against any misdemeanors. Retail theft exploded when it became apparent that there were no consequences. Drug dealing came back to areas I hadn't seen it in for at least a decade. Judges release known violent defendants back into the community where they continue to commit crimes while awaiting trial. There are some very obvious and easy solutions that could curb crime dramatically here.
4. The city's GPS monitoring of people on release (DC eliminated bail many years ago) is basically fake. It's not being monitored 24/7 and is not an impediment to committing additional crimes.
5. When the city legalized marijuana, it coincided with a complete stop of prosecution for people using it in public (which is still illegal!). It is extremely common to see people driving vehicles while smoking weed, which is bad.
6. Trash pickup got really bad during covid, which was weird because DPW has always been one of the best run city services. It seems to be back to mostly normal now, but its drop off and addition to the general sense of malaise in the city was curious.
7. Progressive activists made a huge deal out of the homeless sweep at McPherson Square and how devastating it would be to the local people experiencing unhousedness community. However now that it's done I haven't seen any follow up showing how devastating it truly was, and the park is now usable for all city residents and workers again, which is nice. Additionally, there was very little backlash from anyone outside of the usual DSA/Anarchist/Lefty groups. I think it showed the city that the activists claimed to speak for many more people than they actually do.
8. Things seem to be slowly getting back on the right track. Fare enforcement on Metro has been popular, the previously mentioned McPherson Square cleanup, and I've even seen an uptick in traffic enforcement. I'm cautiously optimistic that the 2020 collective fever is slowly breaking, and that we can get back to being a world class city.
This is all true. Pre-Covid, especially circa 2017, there was a massive pressure campaign from local activists to limit MPD activity. One way this manifested was the NEAR Act. One thing the NEAR Act did for example was add extra paper work for officers to fill out anytime they made a stop. Also pressure from Councilmembers at oversight hearings towards MPD and the Mayor, basically to cut back on stopping and arresting brown people. Then there were the BLM protests. I’m not surprised MPD would roll back their enforcement activities as a result.
Some people here have noted that the drop in enforcement seems greater than the drop in staff, implying that some police may just be refusing to do their jobs. I have no clue if that's true in DC, but anecdotally it's true in Portland. Or at least to put it more charitably, they feel they've been given mixed signals as to whether or not the city actually wants them to do their jobs. It's another city where the homicide rate has NOT fallen to pre-pandemic levels, even though it's fallen from its 2022 peak. Anecdote: my coworker was T-boned and had her car totalled in October 2022 and the other driver tried to flee but he couldn't because he crashed in to a fire hydrant. The police told her they were only there because the other driver hit the fire hydrant. Even if that's true, that feels vindictive to say out loud. (I heard this information second hand, so take with a grain of salt but I've heard similar stories from others)
Homicides per year:
2016: 16
2017: 25
2018: 27
2019: 36
2020: 57 (51 of those from June to December)
2021: 88
2022: 97
2023: 83
2024: 35 from January to June
Don't know about Portland, but I've been reading for a couple years now at:
https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/
The comments today from DC residents Jim_Ed and Eric pretty much nail what dccrimefacts has covered in-depth.
I think the reality is that you can either have very aggressive policing towards the small population that is disproportionately responsible for crime (young black men) and take all the horrible collateral damage that comes with that (plenty of innocent black men being harassed and family members of suspected criminals having their houses tossed). This will require policy makers to trust police officers to actually confront dangerous criminals with an eye towards apprehensions while also preventing the officers from dying. This strategy is politically unpopular.
Alternatively we could find a way to prevent so many disaffected black youth from choosing this horrific existence.
Or, we could pump a bunch of money funded by the ideas of "experts" and policy makers into long range government programs that will fail with little accountability while their designers will move onto great luxurious careers in academia, journalism, and politics.
Seems like this mixes two populations together: the extremely criminal and young Black men. There's some overlap, but the former is only a subset of the latter (and also includes some older people, some non-Blacks and maybe a couple of women)
There's enough of an overlap that enforcement that is at all imperfect or sloppy will end up harassing some innocents, but it's not like that can't be minimized or avoided to some degree. And harms to innocents will always occur in policing, or really any enforcement system, it's just draws a special sort of attention in this case because or the disproportionate racial situation and the high-crime levels which make more enforcement attractive.
The overlap is much more like an eclipse than a basic ven diagram. I'm not sure what the percentage of violent disruptive street crime in DC is committed by black males age 15 - 35 but I would guess it's a majority. I've always believed police do their best to minimize harassing innocents, but if I lived in a mafia ridden neighborhood during the 1950s I certainly wouldn't walk around trying to look like a gangster if I were a businessman or out for a date with my wife.
I also wouldn't be surprised and offended if approached by a police officer explicitly tasked with reducing mafia terror. I would expect it.
96% of homicide suspects and victims in DC are black (from MPD: https://cjcc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/cjcc/release_content/attachments/DC%20Gun%20Violence%20Problem%20Analysis%20Summary%20Report.pdf)
Yowza
"committed by black males age 15 - 35 but I would guess it's a majority"
This could very well be true, but it could also be true that only a small percentage off black males age 15-35 are in that crime pool.
The point is if you reactively arrest a suspect for street crime, they are very likely in that BM 18-35 demographic. But if you proactively follow or bother someone in that same demographic without reason, it's unlikely that they are a criminal.
But the police at best can only "proactively follow or bother" a tiny portion of that entire potentially criminal demographic. They need probable cause to do so, which will stem from actual criminal or criminal adjacent behavior. This naturally makes the police activity more focused and efficient on the solving the problem at hand.
Crime…boy…I don’t know…
That’s when I decided to kick your ass
A lot of takes want to make this about national issues but some of this is clearly DC specific. Homicides fell a lot in 2022, 2023, and (so far, according to the evidence we have) 2024 in most of the country. This doesn't seem to have been true in DC. But it was true in, say, NYC, which has bail reform, progressive DAs, BLM agitation, etc. NYPD arrest activity is back up too. Gotta look at the local angles
Even Philly prosecutes 94% of arrests. DC prosecutes something like 60%. This is a maybe the most notable disparity, but it’s important to emphasize just how big the gaps are even to other very progressive places.
Those rates sound high to me (if the denominator is "all arrests") but that's my sense too of where a lot of the disparity is. So why is that happening? If Larry Krasner and Alvin Bragg are prosecuting more aggressively the natural ideological story seems less compelling
Worth mentioning that DC has some of the most racially disproportionate crime-related statistics in the nation, with Blacks 6x more likely than non-Blacks to die in a traffic accident, 10x more likely to die of a drug overdose, and 30x more likely to die of homicide. (prior to 2020 these numbers were "only" 4x, 9x and 25x).
So it ends up being the case that enforcement in the city is largely about stopping, arresting and convicting Black people. But AD Graves and progressives seem to have forgotten that it's also largely about protecting Black people.
Previous incarnations of the machine for large-scale violent oppression of Black people were also justified in terms of “it’s for their own good” and “look at what a nice society we can have as a result.” I don’t think that type of argument is going to convince skeptics that this time is different.
I'm not quite sure what specific portion of history you're referencing or what specific solution you think I'm suggesting (I'm leaving it pretty vague mostly because the devil is always in the details). But whichever they are I'm sure you're conflating two very different things with a very thin rhetorical argument.
I think there are a lot "smarter" win-win approaches to reducing violent crime in DC, many of which would simply make DC less of an outlier compared to peers or are capacity-related, like getting their drug lab reaccredited, getting serious house arrest, having their DA choose to prosecute a similar level of arrests as peers, taking truancy seriously, having their city counsel target more arrests instead of fewer, redistributing policing resources away from wealthy neighborhoods to high-crime ones, etc..
A lot of these will involve some level of increased enforcement (some won't), and much of the enforcement will disproportionately "target" Black people, for example getting serious about truancy. And because of that, some people will have takes like "being strict about truancy is equivalent to the violence of Jim Crow".
But I think that's just an utterly ridiculous take. It really is the case that punishing some people is good for society, and even for the people themselves. We have truancy rules in my mostly non-Black school district, for example, and most people think they are a good thing, not a bad one. The skeptics just have to be made to realize they are wrong and their "but slavery punished black people, too" logic is wrong and unhelpful.
I think if you look at median educational attainment, unemployment, and HHI by race, the reasons for that disparity become incredibly, starkly clear.
Auto deaths are a little weirder but PG has 13 deaths per 100k where moco and DC are at like 5 (and Arlington is less than 1!)
Simply observing the disparity (and realizing it plugs into policing controversies) is the easy part. Understanding the drivers is much harder. If I understand you're take on that, I don't think I wholly agree, simply because there are many other populations in the US with similar education / unemployment / HHI that don't have the same set of social problems.
It's not at all clear that education and unemployment drive drugs, crime and careless driving rather than the reverse, or that instead there's some hidden 3rd factor (culture?) that sometimes drives all of them in similar directions.
Just to give some examples: Hispanics in the RGV have high rates of poverty and low rates of education, but El Paso and the Tex / Mex border are low crime / low drug use areas. Or take the area where I live in Western PA, where the White population has been fine on education / poverty metrics but nearly leading the country in terms of overdoses. Or Native Americans on many reservations, who often have terrible poverty and education indicators, but have much lower murder rates than Black people in DC, yet way higher drug and alcohol OD rates (and way higher rates of sexual abuse).
Anyways, the point of listing these out is to try to make the case that it's not always clear what causes what when we see these correlations. If DC suddenly became full of low-ed / skill refugees from Somalia or Pakistan I wouldn't expect them to have the same drug / murder numbers as low income Black people in DC have, as a group, right now.
The thing about DC that’s interesting is DC knows who all these people are. Not kidding, they spent a lot of money identifying the 600 or so people who are most likely to commit violent crime. I feel pretty sure that they aren’t far off either. Now, DC has a very weird problem where they know who these people are, but no real idea what to do about it (I mean they tried People of Promise, and the jury is out, but something like 48 of the people in the program were dead or in jail by the end of the year)
The district proper essentially has no unemployed white people (or even poor, unless you count just out of college hill staffers; or blue collar).
Remove Queens, non-hipster Brooklyn, Staten Island and the north Bronx from NYC and you have something analogous to DC.
South Bronx = Anacostia in the analogy.
Just to add to this, I think the median HHI for white people in DC is 160k? There’s really nowhere else in this country like it
It's wild trying to figure out how far you have to get away from DC to find white working class areas.
There's none in Arlington or Fairfax or Loudoun. Manassas used to be and I guess kind of still is, but is heavily Latino. Maybe Fredericksburg/Stafford? For those note familiar with the area, that's 50+ miles away from DC.
On the Maryland side, the PG County inner suburb white enclaves like Hyattsville and Adelphi basically no longer exist. Bowie arguably the last hold out but is being gentrified by affluent black families. Montgomery County has some bounded by the agricultural reserve like Damascus but mainly you have to get all the way out to Frederick and Hagerstown to find them.
Fantastic piece, thank you.
If you’re a cop the deal is (1) it’s basically impossible for your career to be ended and (2) the harder you work, the more people hate you. To quote Tyler Cowen, "solve for the equilibrium".
Shout out to https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/ which covers everything in this article (and much more) in-depth. It's really top-level analysis and probably the best SubStack I know of in terms of completely nailing it's subject.
Seconding this. It's a treasure and a master class on reportage.