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DC goes soft on criminals in law too lenient even for the Democratic mayor

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Catch and release” is one way to describe weak enforcement of immigration law. But in the nation’s capital, unfortunately, the phrase applies to nearly every kind of crime, including some of the most violent.

Washington, DC is in the midst of a murder boom, with more than 200 homicides a year in 2021 and 2022. And every one of the last five years has seen more carjackings than the year before.

From 2021 to 2022, reported carjackings spiked by 36%. Nearly three-quarters of those incidents involved a firearm, and juveniles perpetrated 70%, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

What’s the city council’s answer to this crime wave? To slash sentences and drop prosecutions — even over the objections of DC’s Democratic mayor.

The council passed its Revised Criminal Code Act over Mayor Muriel Bowser’s veto Tuesday, a late but very welcome Christmas present for offenders ranging from petty crooks to carjackers and rapists. The new law guts mandatory-minimum sentencing and eliminates “three strikes” provisions. Repeat offenders will have a lot less jail time to worry about from now on.

It doesn’t take much math to figure out what putting more of these people back on the street for longer periods is going to mean for violent crime in the District.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks to reporters near the scene of a shooting on a metro bus on Jan. 11, 2023.
The Washington Post via Getty Images

Sex criminals get a break, too, with a new shot at getting out of prison before they serve their full sentences. “I don’t think the DC Council should be helping rapists get out of prison early,” Denise Krepp, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, told local station WUSA9.

“It’s crazy,” she said. But that’s life in DC right now, where the mad and the bad make life increasingly dangerous. The city is going down a spiral familiar to those who knew it in the 1980s and early ’90s.

Washington’s Union Station is a symbol of that fearful descent. Just a few years ago, it was thriving with commuters, whose dollars supported an increasingly upscale retail scene within the station. Now the shops and restaurants are gone, and the place is a scene of vacancy and vagrancy. (Though when President Joe Biden wanted to use the station as a set for a speech before the midterms, police cleared out the vagrants for him.)

The national capital is a national disgrace — but an all-too-fitting image of what’s happened in the whole country since the campaign to dishonor police began.

Since the Obama administration’s second term, Americans have been told that police are out of control and racial justice is more important than criminal justice. Liberal Democrats like those on DC’s city council have tried to make life easier for criminals and harder on police when they can’t defund the cops outright.

Washington dc crime scene
Washington, DC has more than 200 homicides a year in 2021 and 2022.
The Washington Post via Getty Images

The result is more murder, most of it in black neighborhoods — where black children are often the victims of the volleys of shots rival criminals aim (or don’t aim) at one another. Those men should be in jail before they can take a life. That means doing the opposite of what the DC city council has done — it means locking up offenders early and for as long as it takes to render them harmless.

Good policing and tough laws make people safe, but safe people feel like they can afford to be forgiving. Republicans as well as Democrats began to embrace “criminal-justice reform” in the Obama years and into the Trump years as well. The DC criminal code has provisions dating back to 1901, so it was a ripe target for reform.

But the kind of reform the country needs is nothing like what the DC Council has done. The capital, like the nation, needs reforms that prioritize reducing crime, not reducing prison populations. The racial justice this country needs is justice for innocent blacks whose lives are lost because police weren’t there to take down the criminals who shoot up black neighborhoods. If “Black Lives Matter” were a philosophy and not a slogan, it would mean empowering the police to bring peace back to our cities.

Washington is in need of drastic reform. But its city council has made a drastic change for the worse. And with a one-party city government, there is little chance of change, even with Democrats like Mayor Bowser recognizing how extreme many members of her party have become. DC has a long road back to good order, and it starts with ending the catch-and-release mentality.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.



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