The Manhattan Institute report calls for Congress to spend $15 million more per year to bring police staffing to pre-pandemic levels.
With crime in Washington, D.C., persisting at elevated post-pandemic levels, a new report argues that Congress needs to spend millions of dollars to hire more police officers, empower a prosecutor who will enforce the rule of law, and accelerate the approval of judges to clear the growing backlog of criminal cases.
Charles Fain Lehman, a criminal-justice policy researcher with the Manhattan Institute, argues in a new report that leaders in the nation’s capital need to increase the capacity of the city’s criminal-justice system, referring to “the volume of manpower, attention, space, time, and other resources that the system can dedicate to its crime-fighting function.”
Lehman contends that certain crimes have increased significantly over the past four years in D.C., while at the same time the city’s crime-control measures have become less active.
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration has been struggling to reduce certain crimes – particularly homicide and carjacking – since the Covid-19 pandemic. The District of Columbia reported 274 homicides in 2023, an increase of 36 percent over the prior year and the highest peak since 1997. There were 959 reported carjackings last year, nearly double the previous year.
While crime increased in many cities in the wake of the pandemic, most have seen improvements over the last two years. That hasn’t happened in D.C. yet, Lehman said. He wanted to know why.
“There’s a lot of speculation out there. There’s a lot of, I think, bad reporting out there about what’s causing those changes,” he told National Review. “I really just wanted to dig into the data and say what is actually happening in D.C. and what is plausibly causing that to happen.”
Looking at the data, he formulated possible solutions to strengthen D.C.’s crime-fighting capabilities.
“The past several years of efforts to solve DC’s crime problems show that officials believe that criminal offenders are reacting to a lack of stiff penalties,” the report says. “But the problem is not leniency; the problem is that, across the criminal-justice system, existing laws are unenforced.”
Lehman’s report suggests that instead of passing tougher laws, as Bowser did when she approved the Secure D.C. public-safety omnibus bill in March, the city “needs to make its system operate at, or above, pre-pandemic levels.”
Building capacity in the city’s criminal justice system necessitates both local and federal action, Lehman’s report states. The Metropolitan Police Department can hire more police officers to patrol the streets and neighborhoods, but restoring the city’s police force to pre-pandemic levels will require more money from Congress.
Lehman proposes that Congress invest $15 million per year over the next four years into MPD on top of its existing funding. MPD’s total proposed budget for hiring amounted to $13.6 million for fiscal 2024. Additional money could be used to counteract some of the factors — retirements, resignations, and poor recruiting —that have left the department understaffed. Those factors were exacerbated by the George Floyd riots of 2020 and the subsequent calls from racial-justice activists to “defund the police.”
Capitulating to the public outcry, the city council slashed MPD’s budget by $15 million in 2020.
Staffing is not the only problem, Lehman reports. Police made fewer arrests last year compared to 2019; there were fewer arrests in 24 of the 29 crime categories during that period, with prostitution and traffic violations experiencing the steepest drops, according to Lehman’s report. Arrest rates have improved slightly since Pamela Smith was confirmed MPD’s new chief in November 2023 and after MPD began targeting juveniles committing auto theft.
In addition to increasing police funding, Lehman argues that Congress should empower D.C. attorney general Brian Schwalb to prosecute criminal cases that U.S. attorney Matthew Graves declines.
Graves, who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021, has the authority to prosecute most crimes in the District, while Schwalb, who was elected, is tasked with prosecuting juvenile offenders and “certain adult misdemeanors,” including “disorderly conduct, aggressive panhandling, possession of an open container of alcohol, and drinking or urinating in public.”
While both Schwalb and Graves are prosecuting serious crimes at a lower rate compared to pre-pandemic levels, Graves has slacked on charging more serious offenses, according to Lehman’s report.
In 2022, his office prosecuted only 47 percent of felonies and 28 percent of misdemeanors. Those numbers rebounded slightly in 2023 to 60 percent and 36 percent, respectively, but they are still lower than the prosecution rates in past years. This is, in part, due to Graves downgrading felonies to misdemeanors.
Lehman argues Graves should increase the prosecution rate and decrease the felony-to-misdemeanor conversion rate, or else be removed from office. To force his hand, Congress could expand Schwalb’s prosecutorial authority over more serious offenses while providing funding to aid his office’s transition to a larger workload, Lehman’s report says.
Another issue Lehman addresses is the growing backlog of criminal cases in the courts partly due to judicial vacancies.
As of August 1, the D.C. Superior Court had nine judicial vacancies out of 62 total positions, according to a running list updated by the D.C. Judicial Nomination Commission. A ninth judge is leaving in October.
The D.C. Court of Appeals has two out of its nine seats vacant, one of which has been empty for a decade.
In an open letter in May, the chief judges of both courts asked the Senate to confirm the pending judicial nominations appointed by the president. The lack of a full panel of judges is further compounded by the increase in crime, meaning “there are more cases that must be heard within statutorily mandated time limits, by substantially fewer judges,” the letter states. “Judges often double and triple book trial dates to comply with speedy trial statutes.”
The plea spurred the Senate to confirm four judges for the Superior Court this summer. There were 13 vacancies at the time the letter was published.
Because judicial vacancies are a recurring problem, Lehman’s report proposes model legislation that could help Congress accelerate the nomination and approval process. He proposes that if the Senate doesn’t confirm the president’s nomination within three months, that judge would be presumptively confirmed.
Lehman believes local and federal leaders are not improving Washington D.C.’s criminal-justice capacity with their recent legislative efforts.
In March, Bowser signed the Secure D.C. Omnibus Emergency Amendment Act. Its provisions include instituting new felony offenses for firearm violations and declaring drug-free zones in hotspots of crime and drug activity. Lehman argues the legislation’s more than 100 policy changes focus too much on severity of punishment rather than on improving system’s ability to fight crime.
The D.C. CRIMES Act, a bill led by House Republicans that aims to give Congress more criminal oversight in the District, has the same problem, Lehman added. The legislation — its full title is the D.C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act — has three main provisions: restricting the youth-offender limit to those only under 18, requiring the D.C. attorney general to create a public website showing juvenile crime statistics, and blocking the city council from changing the lengths of criminal-liability sentencing.
“These provisions turn on what one prominent, pseudonymous commentator labeled a ‘vibes-based theory of crime’ – the idea that messaging about the severity of punishment determines the level of crime,” Lehman wrote. “Again, the bill did little to affect the capacity of the system to control crime.”
House Republicans, led by Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, introduced the bill to exercise more control over the city council to prevent its progressive Democratic members from enacting soft-on-crime sentencing policies. D.C. leaders opposed the bill, claiming it would be harder to strengthen “criminal penalties, or even create new crimes” based on crime trends and would hinder their crime-deterrent efforts if the measure became law.
The D.C. CRIMES Act passed the House in May but awaits a Senate vote.
Despite recent efforts to fight crime, citizens still feel unsafe under Bowser’s leadership. A Washington Post poll in April found that 65 percent of more than 1,600 residents in D.C., Northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland said crime is an extremely or very serious problem in the area. That number was up from 56 percent in 2023.
A clear majority of respondents – 72 percent – were harshly critical of Bowser’s crime-reduction efforts. The Democratic mayor’s overall approval rating of 46 percent was the lowest of her nine-year tenure, down from 58 percent in 2022.
Although crime levels spiked in 2023, there have been improvements in the right direction this year.
Overall violent crime in D.C. is down 35 percent as of Friday compared to the same time last year, according to MPD’s latest crime statistics. Driving that drop is a 31 percent decrease in homicides, a 27 percent decrease in assaults with a dangerous weapon, and a 41 percent decrease in robberies. Similarly, all carjacking offenses have experienced a 50 percent decrease compared to this period last year.
Nonetheless, Lehman stresses that the city council and Congress need to do more to improve crime-fighting focus capacity to get crime under control in the District. The impact that crime has on the quality of life is convincing residents to move out of D.C., he said.
“It’s a thing the city needs to care about because people will care about those things,” he said. “They want to live in places that don’t suck.”