“We are sick and tired of this,” said D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith. “We want to say to our community, we are working hard every single day to ensure that this kind of violence is decreased in our communities.”
The deadly shooting comes as the District is experiencing a downturn in violent crime, including in killings. The city passed the 100-homicide mark 41 days later than in 2023, D.C. police data shows.
Last year, D.C. surpassed the number at its earliest point in two decades and ultimately saw the most killings it had since 1997. The surge, which came as murders declined in other major cities, elicited rebukes from Congress and pressed the D.C. Council to act — shunning progressive strategies for a more punitive approach.
Violent crime in the District is down 33 percent year-over-year, D.C. police data shows, reflecting a broader downturn in the city and across the country, a Washington Post analysis found.
While experts caution that the reasons crime fluctuates are complex, District leaders in interviews and public remarks have attributed the drop in part to the D.C. Council’s new laws and moves to strengthen policing. Detaining more people ahead of their trials, prosecuting alleged crew members known to law enforcement and implementing new policing technologies have made a difference, officials have said as they sought to highlight the trend following a bruising turn in the national spotlight.
“If you want to know why homicide is down? Gun crime is down. You want to know why gun crime is down? People using guns are being held accountable,” D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said in an interview. “That’s a very simple one explanation, but we know there are many things that cause crime to go up and cause crime to go down.”
The pace of homicides in D.C. has sparked and cooled over the past several decades, from a high of 509 in 1991 to a low of 88 in 2012. Homicides this year so far are below where they were between 2020 and 2022, when D.C. was seeing 15-year highs, but higher than they were before the pandemic.
This year’s victims include Ty’ah Settles, a 3-year-old who was riding in an SUV that got caught in the crossfire of a gun battle in Southeast D.C. in May; 15-year-old Victor Bolden, a student at Coolidge High School who was looking forward to playing football next school year; and Kaan Demir, a 28-year-old killed in a possible robbery attempt after dropping his girlfriend off at her home. The first to die was Ashlei Hinds, 18, on New Year’s Day.
A third adult and a small child also were injured Thursday in the shooting that pushed the District over the 100 mark, which occurred just before noon near the intersection of 22nd Street and Alabama Avenue SE, according to D.C. police. The department’s official count consists of all killings that were ruled homicides this year, which can include incidents that occurred in previous years.
The decrease “is a marked improvement, from going the wrong direction to basically the same direction that the country has been going,” said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. Abt, who advises cities across the country on gun violence reduction, said tightening enforcement on the local level could have helped, but it’s hard to truly know.
“I think you have to be cautious, even a bit skeptical, given crime is falling elsewhere,” he said.
A database of reported crimes maintained by The Post, which aggregates data from more than 90 police departments, shows crimes such as homicide, auto theft and robbery have dipped across the country compared with spring 2023. D.C. police data shows carjackings have plummeted by nearly 50 percent, and property crimes are down 15 percent. Firearm-related hospital visits in D.C. are down nearly 30 percent, according to the Health Department.
Some residents and business owners say they can feel the drop in violence. While the killings remain disproportionately concentrated east of the Anacostia River in majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, some neighborhoods crushed by last year’s spike have experienced the steepest drops this year.
“Now, compared to what it was, it’s like a dream come true,” said Ephrame Kassaye, who owns multiple businesses in Ward 8, where D.C. police data shows homicides plummeted 50 percent year-over-year. “Police officers [are] walking out on the streets and facing the people,” Kassaye said, adding that “people getting locked up don’t come out right away like they used to anymore.”
The area around Kassaye’s Washington Highlands convenience store, Chesapeake Big Market, has been a target area for violence interrupters because of feuds between warring crews. At this point last year, there had been five gun-related homicides in the blocks around the shop, which features a mural honoring Lorraine Marie Thomas, a 21-year-old remembered for her efforts to broker peace in her neighborhood before she herself was fatally shot in 2020. So far in 2024, there have been none, according to data from the city’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
In recent weeks, D.C. officials have argued that policy changes they advocated for or implemented deserve at least partial credit.
The D.C. Council, at the urging of Bowser and Smith, passed emergency crime legislation last summer and followed up with a broader package of public safety legislation known as “Secure D.C.” earlier this year. Prosecutors say they have successfully targeted violent neighborhood crews. Violence interruption experts also note that perhaps years of investment in community-based approaches to quelling D.C.’s neighborhood feuds have begun paying off.
Smith has also pointed to operational changes she oversaw, such as the launch of a “real time crime” center with surveillance video feeds across the city and a new unit of volunteer police officers tasked with proactive policing.
But Smith said a key turning point was the emergency legislation that the council passed last summer, which she credits with helping boost morale in the department because of its emphasis on more accountability for people committing crimes.
“That makes it a lot easier for officers to feel like they can be officers,” Smith said.
Others say last year’s spike — and this year’s drop — may have to do with changing conditions for the D.C. neighborhood crews that, according to research, drive a large share of the city’s gun violence. Matthew Graves, U.S. attorney for the District, said the explosion of violence in D.C. last year was in part the result of new and changing alliances among crews that were “different from what we’ve historically seen here.” Crews started taking on each other’s rivals. Conflicts, fueled by social media, no longer followed the traditional neighborhood patterns that law enforcement had come to know, he said.
Graves said D.C. is seeing less of that crew-related violence so far this year. His office has announced a series of indictments involving alleged crew members, the culmination of efforts that began before last year’s homicide spike.
“We know that proactively removing these people from our streets is the most significant thing we can do as prosecutors to impact violent crime trends,” Graves said at a May news conference at which he announced indictments of alleged members of rival crews in Northeast D.C.
Dwayne Falwell, who leads violence interruption efforts in parts of Wards 6 and 7 through his nonprofit Together We Rise, said he also believes that non-police efforts to reach people driving violence are paying off.
“If you were that broken that you would kill somebody, you’re not going to open up to anybody,” Falwell said. “Seeing [them] every day — them saying no at first, no at first — it just took time.”
Joseph Richardson, a University of Maryland professor who is working on a formal evaluation of D.C.’s violence interruption programs, said it’s plausible that violence has calmed because some violence interrupters are seeing results, or because certain high-risk people are currently incarcerated. But he warned about viewing this year’s reduction as indicative of a broader trend, especially since he said D.C. has not properly addressed some of the underlying factors that evidence shows can drive gun violence, such as the city’s racial unemployment gap and high rates of chronic truancy at schools.
“Everyone getting super excited over one year, to me, from an empirical standpoint … I wouldn’t put too much into that until I saw [reductions] consistently over time,” Richardson said.
Lindsey Appiah, deputy mayor for public safety and justice, said the Bowser administration has “long committed to addressing root causes of violence” through measures such as affordable housing and workforce programs.
Despite this year’s drop in violent crime, D.C. residents are more concerned about public safety than they were one year ago, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll in May. Sixty-five percent of Washingtonians consider crime an “extremely” or “very” serious problem in D.C., though 70 percent still feel at least “somewhat” safe from crime in their neighborhoods.
For many in the District, the fear of violence still shapes daily decisions.
Sabrina Brown, a high school administrator who lives in Northwest D.C.’s Brightwood Park, said she does not let her 10-year-old daughter outside at night. She remains shaken by an incident last year, when one of her neighbors was robbed in front of their condo building.
“If it wasn’t for my dog,” Brown said, “more than likely I wouldn’t be out [past dark].”
Henry White, speaking in an interview as he cut a client’s hair in his Kennedy Street barber shop, said he was generally pleased with the direction of the neighborhood. Gun assaults and fatal shootings in the violence interruption target area surrounding the neighborhood are up slightly from this time last year, according to city data, but the level of violence is a far cry from what it was when he was growing up there in the 1990s.
As for city leadership on the issue of violence?
“I guess I could say they’re doing the best they can,” he said.
His client, Yobany Matos, disagreed. From his view, officials let violence rise for years before it spiraled out of control in 2023.
“Bowser let this get this far,” Matos said. “Now, all of a sudden, it’s all hands on deck.”
This story has been updated with information about how D.C. police maintain homicide data.
Read More
