D.C. police expect fewer than 100 homicides this year

Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Tuesday that she believes Washington can finish the year with fewer than 100 killings — a figure that if achieved would be the lowest homicide total in the nation’s capital since the Kennedy administration.

The bold claim from the police chief of a city once routinely called the “murder capital” of the United States was made at a time when police have recorded 88 homicides. That figure is down 25 percent from last year at this time but leaves the city on pace for 140 killings.

“Fewer than 100 homicides is reasonable,” Chief Lanier told The Washington Times. “We’re targeting for under 100, and I think we can do it if we give everything we’ve got.”

Last year, the city marked 100 homicides before the end of July, but police in the District and several other major U.S. cities are seeing declining or steady homicide totals this year.

Los Angeles has recorded a 14 percent decrease in homicides from 234 last year to 201 this year. New York is at 281 killings, a 14 percent decline from 326 last year. Chicago has an 11 percent reduction at 258 homicides, down from last year’s 290. Philadelphia’s homicide total has declined by 10 percent, from 204 to 189. Baltimore is at 140 homicides - the same as this time last year.

But the decline of 25.4 percent in the District - which approached 500 killings in 1991 at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic that spawned gunbattles between rival gangs of drug dealers - is larger than the reductions in those cities.

Still, the decline would have to accelerate significantly to a reduction of at least 47 percent from last year’s total of 186 homicides to meet Chief Lanier’s ambitious goal. The last year the District recorded fewer than 100 homicides was 1963, when 95 were reported.

The police chief said the target is achievable, thanks to technology that has improved the speed and efficiency with which police can react to and intervene in disputes before they lead to deadly violence and to a series of proactive policy initiatives that were aimed at building ties between officers and the neighborhoods they patrol.

“Communities are fighting along with us; we’re building trust,” she said. “People now know an officer by name that they can call and pass information to. In the past, we were this anonymous police force, and we’re not anymore. We are people. We have names. You may not be reporting to ‘the police,’ rather Officer Brown. We’re not asking the community to trust an anonymous police force.”

Chief Lanier has implemented programs like All Hands on Deck, her often maligned signature initiative, which puts all D.C. officers visibly on patrol for a limited period of time.

D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson, chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, which has oversight of the police department, said he does not think the initiative has helped reduce the homicide total.

“I don’t see All Hands on Deck as being a measurable factor in homicide rate, I just don’t,” he said. “It’s not targeted at gang violence or domestic violence or homicide activity. It’s a much more general law enforcement strategy.”

Mr. Mendelson, at-large Democrat, also said he has seen nothing to indicate why homicides are trending downward in the District or across the country.

“It’s never clear why we see these trends even nationally,” he said. “It’s appalling the lack of statistical evidence on the causes and effects of crime. So it makes it more difficult to understand what strategies are most effective.”

Mr. Mendelson noted, however, that police have better strategies in place to deal with the most hardened, violent criminals.

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