Questions for Mayor Bowser's Public Safety Summit
What's the plan to deal with some of DC's most serious issues?
Mayor Bowser is convening a Public Safety Summit tomorrow on Wednesday, May 10th and I’m hopeful that it will give some updates on a number of the topics we’ve covered on this blog. As Colbert King put it:
For people that will be following the summit here’s a quick primer on some of the important issues that I hope the Mayor will address; organized into bolded questions about Policing, Prosecution and Prevention:
Policing:
Arrest rate: Each MPD officer is making ~41% fewer arrests than they were pre-COVID, with the largest decreases in police districts 5, 6 & 7 that have the most gun violence. How does the administration think about this trend and is this something they are attempting to reverse? How?
Closure rate: In 2022 MPD’s Homicide Closure Rate fell to 62%, the lowest it has been since 2015. What is MPD planning to do to reverse this trend? With homicides clustered in Ward 8/Police District 7 are there specific efforts in these areas to bring more murderers to justice?
Positioning: MPD’s officer allocations don’t always correlate with where crimes occur. Officers in the busiest Police Service Areas (PSAs) have ~300-400% more crimes and arrests to deal with than their colleagues in “slower” parts of the District:
This has continued in 2023, with MPD officer staffing having only a limited correlation with overall crime rates or gun crimes:
This all raises questions like: why MPD staffing doesn’t correlate more with crime rates and will MPD’s new strategy will involve moving some officers from lower-crime areas to assist in higher-crime areas?
Administration & Civilianization: Mayor Bowser has proposed “civilianizing” about 18 FTEs within MPD to free up officers for core police duties. However, since 2019 MPD has added ~100 additional sworn officers within administrative and support departments while MPD has shrunk overall:
Given MPD’s need for frontline staffing, are there any further planned “civilianization” efforts or redeployments from these support and administrative parts of MPD?
New MPD Strategy: Chief Contee announced a new strategy for MPD when he announced his departure for the FBI: “This is about officers getting out of their vehicles and engaging with the community by being problem solvers”. What are the metrics that the administration will be using to evaluate and refine this strategy? What are MPD’s specific quantitative goals for this strategy?
Retention: It’s well-known that MPD’s attrition has outpaced recruitment and this trend has continued in 2023. The largest group of officers resigning from MPD are those with 0-5 years of experience, who often have the worst assignments and shifts. Some of the most common complaints within MPD are about long hours and being stuck with shifts that never provide weekends off. What is the administration planning to do to improve the working conditions and experience for junior MPD officers?
Recruiting: MPD has failed to meet its recruiting goals in 2023 despite a 106% increase in recruitment funding in FY 2023. Many area jurisdictions are offering hiring incentives almost as large as DC’s $25K bonus. What else is the administration planning to do to broaden and strengthen MPD’s recruitment pipeline?
Discipline & Standards: The United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) has had to drop at least 65 illegal gun possession cases because of alleged MPD officer misconduct. The USAO has further attributed part of its abnormally high declination rate (67%) to “With body-worn camera and the proliferation of surveillance cameras, we have more information at the charging stage to assess the strength of the evidence we would be presenting later to courts and juries,” which is a diplomatic way of saying that some officers’ testimonies are being contradicted by video evidence. What is the administration doing to identify, correct and/or remove officers whose conduct has led to false arrests or fatally damaged otherwise-legitimate cases?
Prosecution:
United States Attorney’s Office: I’ve written a lot how the USAO in DC has in recent years steadily charged fewer and fewer cases until in FY 2022 they declined to press charges on 67% of MPD’s arrests. More specifically, they seem to be treating arrests for illegal gun possession as less-serious; with many of these arrests never leading to charges. Some MPD officers also allege that the USAO doesn’t share feedback on why it declines to press charges; preventing MPD from improving. What is the administration doing to ensure better MPD-USAO cooperation, especially on gun crimes?
Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS): DC’s unaccredited crime lab has been a big problem and recent oversight responses revealed its Forensic Biology Unit (which handles DNA analysis) “is suffering a backlog of 770 samples in violent crime cases.” Since the current hiring plan will only address this backlog after accreditation (hopefully) in 2024, what is the administration’s plan to improve DFS outsourcing options to provide prompt and accurate testing in the rest of 2023?
Prevention:
Recidivism: As Chief Contee said, “The average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide.” Many of the most serious crimes in DC are committed by those with significant prior arrest history. Partially, this is due to those arrests not leading to charges (see previous discussion of the USAO’s role in this problem) but it’s also because many (but not all) convicted individuals are falling back into crime upon release. What is the administration doing to address root causes of recidivism? What is the administration doing with the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA) to better supervise and support DC’s population of returning citizens to prevent recidivism?
Pathways & People of Promise: DC has targeted programs aimed at the individuals most at-risk of gun violence. However People of Promise has struggled to enroll many of its prospective clients or connect them with employment. Just 42 out of 198 (or 21%) People of Promise have been “connected” with subsidized or unsubsidized employment (and “connected” does not necessarily mean “still employed”). In the “Pathways Program” only 47% of participants ever got subsidized jobs and only 18% have found unsubsidized jobs (and this is during an unusually-good labor market). How does the administration plan for these programs to enroll more of the highest-risk people in DC, connect them with employment and generally keep them from engaging in gun violence?
Violence Interrupters: DC has two difference Violence Interrupter (VI) programs; one under the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) and “Cure The Streets” under the Attorney General (OAG). ONSE’s new Director Linda Harlee Harper has indicated that she intends to make a number of changes to ONSE. How does the administration plan to ensure that the VI program is effectively mediating disputes, spreading best practices from better-performing vendors and is offering sustainable pay/funding for the vendors engaged in this work?
I earnestly hope that the summit leads to productive discussions of these issues. None of these questions are “gotchas” since they are all about well-documented, longstanding issues. Many of these problems are ones that concern people across the political spectrum. Best of luck to everyone who will be participating or following along in the summit.