DC Council Passes ‘Emergency’ Bill to Counter Soaring Crime Rate

WASHINGTON — The District of Columbia Council approved a get-tough bill Tuesday intended to put a dent in the city’s surging crime rate.

Overall crime in the nation’s capital is up 30% and homicides by 17% so far this year compared with 2022, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

On June 7, the police reported more than 100 homicides in the first six months of 2023, the earliest Washington surpassed that figure in two decades.

Demands for what Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser called an “emergency crime bill” started with crime victims and now are being taken up by members of Congress. They are threatening federal intervention to resolve what some Republicans say are lapses in local government.

“We can’t do it with one or two hands tied behind our back,” Bowser told reporters before the vote. She was talking about legal restrictions she said constrain the ability of police to halt violent crime.

Key provisions of the Prioritizing Public Safety Emergency Amendment Act would:

• Make it easier for judges to keep pretrial criminal defendants in jail, particularly if they are charged with violent crimes.
• Give judges broader authority to keep juvenile carjacking suspects in custody.
• Create a new felony for recklessly firing a firearm in public, even when it is not directed at anyone.
• Provide reimbursement for Washington, D.C., residents who install security cameras.
• Make strangulation a felony, regardless of whether it results in serious injury.

Even before the council approved the bill by a 12-1 vote, it ran afoul of warnings from its own members about possibly being overturned by court judgment.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said parts of the bill were “constitutionally suspect.”

He was referring mostly to the greater emphasis on pretrial detention. The Fifth and Sixth Amendments create a presumption of innocence for criminal defendants until they are proven guilty.

Despite any good intentions by the D.C. Council in approving the bill, if it is overturned by court order, “It doesn’t help anybody,” Mendelson said during a press conference before the vote.

A better option would be to give the police department the resources it needs to improve its “closure rate” for crimes, he said. The closure rate refers to arresting and successfully prosecuting criminals.

Only 35% of homicides in Washington last year resulted in arrests of suspects, Mendelson said. A year earlier, the rate was 42%.

“What’s necessary here is getting good arrests and prosecutions,” he said.

He put part of the blame on Congress, which is considering a proposal to cut the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget by $20 million next year.

“Congress is not being helpful,” Mendelson said.

Democratic Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto disagreed that the bill is misguided by not focusing on closure rates for crimes.

When she helped to craft the bill, she said the city council worked with the police to figure out what they needed to increase the closure rate.

“That’s part of what this emergency bill does,” Pinto said.

She mentioned as an example that in the first three months of this year, more than 100 criminal defendants in Washington who were released on bond committed other crimes while they awaited trials.

The bill is effective for 90 days. Afterward, the D.C. Council plans to consider whether to reauthorize it, perhaps permanently.

The only vote against the bill came from Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. She objected to the expanded use of pretrial detention, saying it could interfere with constitutional rights to “due process.”

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