Amid debt-default buzz in Washington and sensational news of a non-white "white supremacist Nazi" crashing into White House barricades, D.C. crime rates, flying right under our nose, are on pace to be the highest since the new decade began, according to Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) year-end crime data analyzed by Townhall.
After what seems to be a tragically annual Memorial Day Weekend of violence in the nation's capital, which this year included the violent death of 17-year-old Brendan Ofori aboard a Metro train, Townhall took a look at local D.C. crime by the numbers.
For this analysis, Townhall took current year-over-year data from D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department and extrapolated those increases for the remainder of 2023 to estimate where year-end totals may land. While the final totals could vary from these projections due to seasonal and other variations, it's important to look at the trajectory of crime after D.C. tried — unsuccessfully — to rewrite its criminal code and struggles to address crime that continues to surge across reporting categories.
If the current pace seen through the end of May continues for the rest of 2023, the total number of criminal offenses at the end of the calendar year would exceed 31,500 occurrences, making this the first year with a figure greater than 30,000 since 2019, according to annual MPD data reports from previous years.
One potential reason for the acute decrease in crime following 2019 — before its turnaround and sharp rise in recent years — could be the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which, even with rampant Black Lives Matter looting, saw lower numbers of property crime. Over the past three years, however, there has been an increase in that metric including a 30-percent jump from this same point last year. This spike in property crime looks to be primarily driven by motor vehicle theft, a category that is up 118 percent over this same point in 2022.
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What's more worrisome is that violent crime, which had remained relatively stable throughout the pandemic, has also seen a year-to-date increase of 16 percent. If this trend continues (again, assuming the current pace continues through the rest of the year) reported violent incidents would eclipse 4,400, the most since 2017.
Homicides in the D.C. area have outpaced last year's number in the same period by 15 percent, and that's the smallest increase of the big three violent crime types. Robberies rose by 24 percent and sex abuse is seeing the highest surge of violent crime with a 30 percent spike. Oddly enough, even arson has had a relatively inflated total from two incidents to eight compared to the same period last year.
If the current homicide spike continues, the year-end total will hit 226, an elevated number on par with recent years:
It should be noted that as the homicides have spiked, so has the number of recovered firearms. In 2020 and 2021, the police retrieved more than 2,300 firearms, a number previously not hit for at least a decade, and another indication that D.C.'s policies aimed at reducing violence and keeping dangerous individuals off the city's streets are failing to turn the tide:
Needless to say, it's no wonder the capital city has again earned a bad reputation for violent crime. Julio wrote about the out-of-control crime in D.C. earlier this week:
Over the Memorial Day weekend, crimes that occurred included shootings, a car being set on fire with people inside, and a woman being found with stab wounds in the Navy Yard neighborhood.
“Crime is out of control in the Nation’s Capital and D.C. Police are doing everything we can with the amount of officers we have left. Officers are leaving faster than they can be replaced and we cannot find anybody to take this job because of the D.C. Council’s misguided and crippling anti-police legislation they passed," D.C. Police Union official Adam Shaatal told Townhall.
Biden and the heavily Democrat D.C. government have done little to slow down the crime rates rapidly heading in the wrong direction. In April, the House finally blocked a George Floyd-inspired D.C. police reform package that would've imposed limits and bans on the Metropolitan Police Department, including the removal of chokehold practices and "military-style equipment," according to NBC News. The law would also have made it harder for police to access riot gear and tear gas, which House Republicans argued risked placing D.C. police in "dangerous positions" that could jeopardize their safety. GOP leaders also explained that the rules were so restrictive they'd had led to a wave of resignations in the district, Fox News reported.
"The D.C. police department has seen over 1,190 police officers leave the force since the beginning of 2020," said House Oversight and Accountability Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY), during debate on the House floor. "That’s about one-third of the D.C. police department. Nearly 40 percent of those officers resigned. That means they chose to leave the department instead of dealing with the increasingly impossible burdens placed on them by the council. Since then, crime has been soaring in the district."
Even some Democrats agreed the D.C. council is too soft on crime, and 14 House Democrats broke away from party leadership when they voted with Republicans to kill the rewrite of D.C.'s criminal code by a vote of 229-189.
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