After five years, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier says that her strategy to reduce murders in Washington D.C. is on the right track, despite an increase in the number of homicides during 2013 compared to the total for 2012. That increase can largely be attributed to this year’s mass shooting at Washington Navy Yard in September when 12 people lost their lives, Lanier said.
In 2012, the department reached a milestone when they ended the year with 88 (official) homicides, the lowest total since 1963. This year, the District will end the year with more than 100 homicides.
In an interview with Homicide Watch in her office at MPD headquarters, Lanier expressed interest in partnering with public and private organizations to help those at risk of becoming involved in a homicide. After years as a police officer, Lanier has a better understanding of what types of intervention could be helpful, she said.
Lanier also reflects on her long-term strategy for fighting homicides, including how it affects violent crime and robberies, and ways she is adapting the strategy to accommodate broader trends.
A text version of the interview is below:
Homicide Watch: Last year, you said that one of your goals was to decrease the number of juveniles both as suspects and victims in homicides. Our data suggests that that number has stayed low in 2013, (five victims, three suspects), but hasn’t fallen. What did MPD do to keep the figure low this year, and what are areas of renewed or increased focus?
Lanier: The things that involve most homicide victims under the age of 18 is very consistent with last year. Last year we had three deaths that were all infants and all domestic or familial relationships. We saw it again this year, we had three children under the age of four that were, in some way or another, related to a family member or domestic related. For me, that means we’ve done really well in trying to reduce the other things that put juveniles at risk for homicide, which is gang violence. We’ve done well on that.
We don’t have a lot of young teenagers being shot to death on the street. But we’ve had two years in a row where we have had children lose their lives in domestic type situations. So now, my job is to try and enlist the support of other partners that can help me to try and protect those children because obviously there’s issues that need to be dealt with in families, particularly families with young children to try and make those children safer.
Homicide Watch: So what kind of partners would you like to work with?
Lanier: If you look at the cases we have, in some cases, it’s inexperience of parents. There are both public and private resources out there to help educate young parents or new parents on things that can potentially be dangerous for newborns and young children. Some of that may be government services by looking at calls to child and family services and maybe having a component with those interventions where they can do some interactive type parenting skills things. Some of it may be private sector. It’s not my area of expertise, but I need the expertise from outside helpers.
Homicide Watch: Now that drops in the numbers of homicides aren’t so dramatic, how do you fine-tune your existing strategy to continue reducing homicides?
Lanier: In law enforcement, you do this for year after year after year. It’s easier for me to look at cases knowing some of the background information and say look, if there had been some intervention somewhere else by some other entity, would that help to have prevented this case? So now it’s time for me to continue to focus on the things that I have been focusing on, because we can’t let those go. But to advocate with my partners out in the other agencies and private sector to see how they can help us to reduce some of these cases like we’ve seen with the domestic violence cases.
Homicide Watch: What do you attribute the increase in the number of homicides during 2013 to?
Lanier: Well, unfortunately the Navy Yard. When you look at year to year calculations of shootings, homicides, things of that nature, you obviously are comparing year to year amongst equally what types of crimes you’re looking at. We didn’t have a mass shooting like that with Navy Yard in our history to compare that to. That mass shooting, that’s 12 people that were murdered in one instance, 12 people murdered in less than 20 minutes. So that is what had the biggest impact on our numbers.
If you look at homicides with the exclusion of the Washington Navy Yard, we’re right about where we were last year. It’ll fluctuate throughout the year, all the way to the end of the year, but we’re right about where we were. We still have a lot of work to do. Even with 88 murders last year, and that being a landmark year in terms of reductions, it’s still not a happy point for us, we still think that we can get that number much lower.
Homicide Watch: In Chicago and New York City, the police departments monitor social media because of its impact on crime. Does MPD monitor social media and what have you learned about how it affects homicide?
Lanier: Social media has played an increasing role in violence amongst young people, and typically not homicides, so to speak, but violent crimes—assaults and robberies, things like that.
Our biggest concern for what puts you at risk for being involved in a homicide, whether you’re a suspect or a victim, gang activity still remains on the list, street robberies.
Last year, we said that street robberies were a big deal. We were concerned about street robberies because of the potential to become deadly and result in homicides, so we’ve kept that strategy going, we’ve reduced robberies by three percent because we are still having homicides that were the result of robberies.
The other thing that puts a lot of people at risk, we’ve seen a lot cases this year where young people wanted to hang out in the neighborhood and shoot a game of craps with their friends, just think of it as gambling, we see a lot of cases that result in homicide that come from those type of interactions, so either somebody who loses and is not happy about that loss and violence breaks out then or robberies of those craps games. I think our strategy has been going the right way, I think we’re looking at the right things but we’re not done yet.
You’re most at risk for being in a homicide if you’re a gang member, if you’re out on the street gambling, if you’re involved in robberies, so those are the things that really put you at risk.
Homicide Watch: What are you seeing in terms of gang-related homicides this year?
Lanier: We’ve seen a dramatic drop off in gang related murders. We did have some cases this year where we had validated gang members who were victims of homicides and we had some cases where validated gang members were arrested for homicide. What we didn’t see was gang on gang violence and gang on gang retaliation, we just didn’t see that. That is what drove our homicides for many many years.
Even in 2008 and 2009, think back to what happened in Trinidad even, where you had 10, 11 homicides in a weekend. That was all gang related. We don’t see that anymore. We haven’t cured the city of any gang participation or gang violence, but I think we’ve made significant progress. We can’t let up now.
Homicide Watch: For gang related homicides, is community intervention a big part of your strategy?
Lanier: It is for the younger gang members, for some of the older gang members, the big intervention is on us.
I think we have good communication with our parents, with the kids in school. Our officers that are working the schools go and do home visits, talk to parents and bring issues to parents. We have good parental involvement, we have good intervention there.
We do get good community support from our text tip line, so we do get a lot of information that way. There’s still that tough group of older gang members that we still struggle with trying to deal with. I think the community participation has been has been very good.
Homicide Watch: Among the tactics in your arsenal, what is one of the most successful ones?
Lanier: Technology has been extremely successful in a lot of ways. I think the word has gotten out and people know now that we have very sophisticated technology in terms of evidence processing and collection of DNA. Having the ability to close homicide cases strictly on DNA. And while that homicide has already occurred, it prevents that person from committing another homicide. The case I’m thinking of was a robbery. So that person may have taken another life at some point had we not been able to close that case and get that person off the street. So technology in terms of science.
[Also], I can’t think of hardly any place in any major American city that you can go that you’re not caught on somebody’s camera. Private people in their homes, in their backyards, cameras on businesses, there’s cameras everywhere. So there’s very very few places you can travel and commit a crime where you’re not going to be caught on camera.
So technology plays a huge role. I think people realize that it’s very difficult to get away with a murder with the technology that’s out there. We have a lot of technology and we use it to make those cases. For high-end violent offenders, that helps the murder rate because if we catch the ones that are committing the crimes quickly, we prevent future crimes.
Homicide Watch: How do you use the data that you collect?
Lanier: How do I know what’s the best strategy to reduce homicide if I don’t know in great detail who’s involved in the homicide, what was the motive of that homicide.
I’ll go back to the example of domestic violence. The cases involving young children, what are the commonalities of the things that I can focus on? We did that with robbery, we knew that robbery has a high risk for violence and therefore homicide, so we targeted robbery to try and reduce the robbery related homicides.
So that data has to be accurate, has to be timely, and it has to be analyzed every single day. We’ve had a strategy for five years that’s worked, but we shift our emphasis on the four or five things that are a part of our strategy every day.
Last year, a large part of our strategy was focusing on children, those victims and suspects involved in homicides because we knew what the data said in terms of analysis. Robbery, we knew that was something that we should focus on. You have to look at that every day because it changes. It changes week by week, it changes month by month. Put a strategy together, stick with your strategy, but analyze it every day. So data is critical.
Homicide Watch: In a recent talk at the American Bar Association, you mentioned one homicide commander who didn’t have the “right attitude” in his approach. Can you talk about more about what you think is the right attitude?
Lanier: Your attitude equals your effort. Your attitude equals people’s confidence. So if you think about all the answers I’ve given to you today, we build trust in the community because people know that we care, everybody’s safety and security matters equally, every homicide is equally important and we have to have the mentality that we can prevent homicides and we’re going to do everything that we can to continue to prevent homicides. We can and we do.
And that’s a shift for law enforcement from decades ago, the decades-old mentality that we’re police; we respond, we respond, we respond to things after they happen and that we can’t be in people’s homes to stop homicides. I don’t think that that’s the right attitude for any of us. I think that the mentality has to be not only in the police department, but in the community.
If we don’t come to work everyday thinking that my job is to prevent homicides, I can prevent homicides, then how do we expect the community to think that homicides can be prevented and I’m gonna do my part? So it is really more a matter of your attitude, if you have the right attitude, you’re going to put the effort and people are going to believe in you and they’re going to work with you. You come to work with the attitude that I just can’t prevent homicides, then you won’t.
Homicide Watch: Other than numbers, what are other signs that progress is being made in reducing the number of homicides?
Lanier: If you look across the city, we’ve seen dramatic reductions in the shootings out on the street. Year after year, we’re seeing reductions in the shootouts out in the community where there’s shots being fired.
You don’t see that like you’ve seen in years past. Sometimes we have homicides that are very tragic, two people get into a fight, one person punches another person, the other falls and strikes their head. So, if you overall look at the types of homicides that you see in Washington D.C. today compared to the types of homicides that we saw five years ago, this is a very different place. We aren’t seeing gang shootouts in the middle of the day on the street.
We’re making a lot of progress in terms of seeing victims of street crimes. We dropped domestic violence murders pretty dramatically over the year. We’ve done some pilot projects with our partners in intervention to try and make a lot of our domestic violence victims safer. There’s a lot of other measures beyond the number.
We have to look at the totality of the circumstances and are we having success in the things that cause the most homicides and yes, we are. I still want to see the numbers go down, I don’t want to minimize that. But I do feel comfortable we’re doing the right thing.
Homicide Watch: What are your key goals for next year?
Lanier: Obviously the thing that make people feel the most unsafe in a community is violence. So we want to continue to drop the violent crime.
We’ve seen violent crime go down again this year. We want to make sure that we continue to have those reductions. I realize that after so many years of big drops, we have to fight harder and the drops may not be as dramatic, but they have to be in the right direction.
We still have key elements of the strategy that we implemented five years ago that we have to stick with. We haven’t resolved the gang problem, we still have individuals out there who are involved in violence through gang participation so we need to not let the pressure off there.
We need to continue the focus on illegal firearms that are so prevalent in our homicide deaths and I think we need to continue to focus on our young people if we’re talking about the most at risk youth now being the extremely young, it’s a different strategy for us. Those are the key things for 2014, but we’d like to see the numbers for violent crime and homicide continue to come down.
