Budget cuts and 770 untested violent crime DNA samples

Highlights from the Judiciary and Public Safety draft budget report

DC’s local budget process is underway and this week the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety (which has oversight over most of the crime-related efforts this blog covers) released their “Fiscal Year 2024 Committee Budget Report.” This represents the committee’s response to Mayor Bowser’s proposed budget (reviewed here) and is therefore heavily guided by the committee’s Chairwoman, Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto. This is her first budget since taking over the committee chair position from Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen. The committee is proposing some meaningful changes relative to the Mayor’s budget and the report included some very concerning facts about key District agencies:

• The committee proposed no net changes to the Mayor’s funding levels for the largest agencies like the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) and Department of Corrections (DOC)

  • The committee agreed with (soon to be former) Chief Contee and Mayor Bowser that MPD is likely to continue to shrink due to resignations and budgeted for a smaller force. The proposed committee budget would also keep School Resource Officers (SROs) in DC schools.

• The committee restored ~$4M of $35M that the Mayor cut from the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG)

  • $2.5M of this “restored” funding was aimed at mitigating steep cuts to legal aid for poor residents

  • The report revealed that OVSJG’s truancy program only served 8% of the 24,000 DCPS students that were “chronically absent” and is facing an over 50% budget cut from the Mayor’s budget (that the committee did not reverse)

• The committee cut the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) and the Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) even more than the Mayor’s proposed reduction

  • The report revealed that DFS has a backlog of 770 untested DNA samples from violent crimes and no plan to resume key shell casing analyses to support MPD

• The committee added an additional $1.2M to the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, mostly to support “Safe Commercial Corridors Grants.”

Here’s a subset of the many agencies within this committee’s purview and how the proposed funding levels have changed from last year, to the Mayor’s proposal to the committee’s proposal. In general, the committee didn’t change the overall funding levels very much:

Starting with MPD, the committee kept the Mayor’s overall 1.9% budget cut. The committee report goes to great lengths to frame this cut as reflecting recruiting/retention realities and not an ideologically motivated “defunding”:

”This proposed budget reflects MPD’s ongoing challenges to hire sworn members quickly enough to offset attrition in its force. As Chief Contee noted in testimony to the Committee, MPD has experienced a net loss of nearly 450 sworn officers since the end of FY 2020, and more than 600 officers since 2014, when MPD entered a “retirement bubble.” Chief Contee has repeatedly warned that given national employment trends and the reduced interest in law enforcement careers, MPD’s staffing levels may not recover for more than a decade. The Committee recognizes these challenges while supporting continued efforts to hire and retain officers.”

“Throughout the budget process, the Committee explored possible options for improving hiring and retention in the near term, including directing additional funding to MPD. Ultimately, though, the Committee concluded—based on input from MPD—that additional investments would simply not be effective at this time, and indeed, that the Agency would likely be unable to even find useful ways to spend additional funding.”

This pessimistic language first from the Mayor and now the Council seems to reflect a consensus that MPD’s efforts to fix its recruitment and retention problem will not be successful for at least a few years. I hope that District leaders will continue to try and broaden MPD’s recruitment pool and fix the many workplace problems that are worsening MPD retention (more details in this post). This context makes it even more important that the officers we have are proactively fighting crime and building cases that hold up in court. It’s concerning that arrests-per-officer are down ~41% with the largest decreases in districts 6D, 7D and 5D which have 63% of DC’s gun crimes:

Most of the media attention on MPD in this budget seems to be centered on the School Resource Officers (SROs). The committee report pushes back on the Police Reform Commission (PRC) recommendations about SROs and would allow MPD to keep them. This topic warrants a full post but I will note that SROs are less than 2% of MPD’s staffing so their impact (good or bad) is a relatively small share of MPD overall.

The largest budget difference between the Mayor and committee’s proposals is in the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG). The committee restored ~$4M of the $35M in cuts that the Mayor proposed. So these programs are still facing a 28% cut. $2.5M of this “restored” funding was aimed at mitigating steep cuts to legal aid for poor residents. The committee cited studies that show a return of “$5 to $9” for every $1 in legal aid due to preventing residents from being evicted and then needing more expensive government services:

Obviously those unnamed studies may be biased but the logic makes sense so these cuts are concerning. The report also revealed that OVSJG’s truancy program only served 8% of the 24,000 DCPS students that were “chronically absent” and is facing an over 50% budget cut from the Mayor’s budget (that the committee did not reverse). 24,000 students being “chronically absent” is by itself a stunning figure (if not a surprising one to people who watch this issue). The fact that the truancy program only helped 8% of these students raises fundamental questions about what this program is doing and how the Mayor intends to fix this problem going forward.

The committee made slightly larger cuts to the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) and the Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) than the Mayor’s proposal. The ONSE section is notable for having 5 mentions of how the committee is “unclear” how the office intends to use certain funds or programs:

• "it is unclear whether the number of FTEs in the Mayor’s proposed budget is accurate"

• "It is still unclear, though, what the plan for this program will be"

• "It is unclear to the Committee what the impact of these cuts to VII will be"

• "it is unclear how much ONSE’s new leadership’s review of Agency’s operations will alter programming and services"

• "It is unclear...how many Full-Time Equivalents (“FTEs”) this funding will support."

This is quite concerning because the very point of performance and budget oversight is that there should be clarity about how government agencies intend to spend public funds. It’s also notable that the committee raised a lot of unfavorable comparisons of ONSE’s violence intervention programs to the (seemingly more successful) programs run by the Office of the Attorney General:

The data does suggest that the OAG program is more successful; gun violence in the OAG areas is down 20% while it is up 25% in the ONSE areas.

The Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) also took a slightly larger budget cut due to an adjustment in its vacancy rate (which has been very high in recent years). The committee only temporarily agreed with the Mayor’s proposal to shift some DFS roles to MPD. Of more immediate concern, the report disclosed 2 major shortcomings in DFS:

• The Forensic Biology Unit (which handles DNA analysis) “is suffering a backlog of 770 samples in violent crime cases.” Thankfully, the budget is proposing hiring analysts to clear this backlog once the lab is re-accredited in 2024 but this suggest that the current outsourcing workarounds are failing. MPD did the work to collect evidence in these serious crimes and they’re just sitting there for lack of sufficient vendor capacity. I sincerely hope this is seen as a scandal and prompt action is taken to clear this backlog well before 2024.

• DFS “has no immediate plans to stand back up the Firearms Examination Unit.” This is a concern because this unit formerly “compared fired casings to casings collected from crime scenes and made determinations on whether the collected bullet was fired from the same weapon.” While the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is providing some support by conducting ballistics firing tests, they do not do the kind of casing analysis to connect shootings to specific guns (and therefore suspects). With so many of MPD’s gun cases being dropped by the USAO (including up to 50% of a recent batch) enhancing DFS capability to support those cases ought to be a priority.

The last major change in the proposed budget was an additional enhancement of $1.2M to the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, mostly to support new “Safe Commercial Corridors Grants.” The Mayor had already increased funding here a lot to support the Safe Passage program. The proposed new Commercial Corridors grants “will provide flexible funds to organizations engaged in maintaining commercial and public spaces in commercial corridors for the purpose of promoting public safety and health within the commercial district and surrounding area through various activities.” This makes sense given some of the stated policy aims of CM Pinto (whose ward has some of the largest commercial corridors in DC) and it will be interesting to see how this program evolves.

Overall, this report made for some rather depressing reading. I thank the committee staff for distilling many hours of testimony and thousands of pages of oversight responses into a readable document. I don’t think they got everything 100% correct but this does reflect solid staff work and I’d be completely unable as a citizen to write about these topics without their work. This isn’t the final word on the budget. This is the committee proposal and then there is the markup (which I was not able to view) and then the entire Council will debate the overall budget. There will certainly be a fight over SROs and possibly other parts of the Public Safety budget. I encourage everyone who is a reader and DC resident to be involved in this process and tell your ward, at-large and chair councilmembers how you want them to vote.