DC mayoral candidate’s crime plan would repeat other cities’ mistakes

Robert White, the D.C. mayoral contender and at-large councilman who is frequently named one of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s top competitors in the Democratic primary, sounded off on Wednesday on one of the campaign’s most pressing issues: violent crime. In a 25-page proposal, White outlined a plan to refocus D.C.’s criminal justice infrastructure dramatically, placing himself squarely to Bowser’s left on it.

Violence remains a major problem in the district. There were 226 homicides in the city in 2021, a multidecade high that was a 14% increase from 2020 and 36% from 2019. White should be applauded for recognizing the problem. But his solutions, unfortunately, are more heat than light, embracing trendy but poorly supported ideas in liberal criminal justice policy while “decentering” old-fashioned policing, still one of the most effective crime-fighting tools policymakers have.

So-called violence interrupters are central to White’s plan, and he called them “our best tool for preventing crime is violence interrupters” in an interview with DCist. Violence interruption entails hiring individuals from the community to intercede directly in feuds before they turn violent. Under a White administration, the city would move from a small pilot program to a fully staffed violence interruption team, which would be responsible for tackling the homicide wave.

The problem is that most experts agree that there isn’t evidence to show that violence interrupters consistently reduce crime. High-quality evaluations show spotty records. In Chicago, for example, interrupters had no effect on shootings in the majority of neighborhoods studied and no effect on gang homicides in any. In Pittsburgh, rates of violent crime actually rose following the implementation of the program. That doesn’t mean violence interruption can’t work — whether they do or not is highly contingent — just that it is by no means “the best tool” for fighting crime.

Similar wishful thinking infects other elements of the plan. White insists that the district needs to get serious about getting guns finally off the streets, even though it already has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws, and the MPD already recovers thousands of guns per year. He calls nonspecifically for more investment in community services, mental health, and youth services, as though the city were not already spending $5 billion annually on such support. And he advocates for establishing a “safe” drug consumption site, a practice with little evidentiary support, which creates disorder in the communities such facilities, still illegal under federal law, have been placed in.

White misses the mark, too, in pushing for reductions in police and carceral capacity. It’s fine to move responsibility for crisis management out of the hands of the police, though such programs invariably address a tiny fraction of 911 calls. It’s a worse, albeit popular, idea to take police off traffic duty. But what D.C. needs right now is not “decentering” police; it needs more police on the streets. White fails to note that in 2020, the MPD employed 5.9 sworn officers per 1,000 district residents, according to the FBI. The staffing ratio has fallen since 2013, dropping more than 20% in that time.

That matters because there is overwhelming evidence that hiring police and putting them on the beat cuts crime. We know this because every high-quality study finds that police hiring reduces crime, particularly violent crime. One recent study estimated that every additional 10 officers prevented one homicide, with bigger gains accruing to black citizens. Evidence from D.C. to Houston shows that putting police on a block drives crime down in that area.

There’s no reason liberals can’t accept these facts. A police-first response to crime can be combined with sensible, evidence-based reforms such as deescalation and procedural justice training. A “hot spots”-focused strategy can target the people and places most prone to crime while leaving law-abiding citizens alone.

Unfortunately for Washington, White seems less interested in what works than what’s in vogue. Calls for more funding for children to process trauma are poor succor for the neighborhoods terrorized daily by gang shootouts. The best prescription for that situation is policing, and voters shouldn’t believe White when he says otherwise.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, working primarily on its Policing and Public Safety Initiative, and is a contributing editor of City Journal.