Amid all of the other drama and problems in Washington, D.C., it is also experiencing a surge in crime. 2023 was one of the worst years for crime in the city in decades. (Or best, if one is a criminal — unless one dislikes competition.) As National Review’s editors noted in February, “In 2023, overall crime increased 26 percent over 2022. That includes major increases in property crime (24 percent), violent crime (39 percent), and motor-vehicle theft (82 percent). The city also saw more homicides in 2023 than in any year since 1997.”
Things have gotten bad enough that the Democrats in this overwhelmingly blue city are turning on each other over a recall effort against D.C. city councilman Charles Allen, who buys into trendy progressive bromides about how to deal with criminals.
But Mayor Muriel Bowser thinks those who point such things out are being too negative. “Don’t be so down on D.C.,” she said at an event on Monday. She can call it whatever she likes. But accurately describing and understanding deteriorating quality of life in the nation’s capital is a necessary prelude to doing something about it.
Two articles in the Spectator World contribute well to our understanding of the problem. Tim Rice surveys the odd combination of political factors that have contributed to the crime surge, the most important of which is the declining belief in the power of deterring crime. “Rather than cops deterring crime, cops are deterred by public scrutiny and do-nothing prosecutors,” he writes. The result could be a seemingly inescapable death spiral for the city, as crime and fear thereof keeps major portions of it underpopulated: “Crime will persist as residents flee, but flight won’t stop until crime ebbs.” And Matt McDonald, a resident (for now) of the hip Navy Yard area, focuses on his environs. Surveying the recent record of crimes in this neighborhood full of nice new apartments with rooftop pools, McDonald concludes that it is “a failing experiment in gentrification,” and one that doesn’t promise to get better anytime soon.
Both articles are worth reading. They furnish evidence of D.C.’s continuing problems, to which its leaders must devote their attention. To be fair, in some senses, they are. Bowser herself admitted, at the same Monday event, that 2023 was a rough year for crime. And in the recent past, she has resisted some of the D.C. council’s worst instincts concerning law enforcement. The council itself seems to have grown somewhat more sensible. Earlier this month, it passed (and Bowser signed) a promising public-safety overhaul bill, imposing harsher sentences on a variety of crimes.
But all of these actions depend on a recognition of the problem, a recognition that is welcome, if belated. That there has been such recognition, however, is proof that one can be “down” on the city as its leaders have let it become without cheering on its demise. Some of those very leaders are acting like it’s possible to be that way, anyway.