Homicide Watch D.C.

The DC Council this week approved a truancy and youth mental health services bill crafted in response to the South Capitol Street shooting.
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Greater Greater Washington looks at how DC police are ramping up high-tech crime-fighting efforts:

Public listservs now include more than 10,000 members and allow citizens to read arrest and crime reports in almost real time. MPD has installed speed cameras around the city, added closed-circuit television cameras, and ShotSpotter devices, which immediately alert police to the sound of gunfire, in high-crime areas.

Not all technology investments are working, however. A 2011 study by the Urban Institute concluded the city’s more than 70 neighborhood crime cameras do not have a measurable effect on crime.
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MPD Chief Cathy Lanier responded in an editorial today to the Post’s report about how MPD calculates— and advertises— its annual homicide closure rate.

Wrote Lanier:

On Feb. 19, The Post published a front-page article headlined “The trick to D.C.’s homicide closure rate,” suggesting that the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was somehow tricking the public by announcing that it had a 94 percent homicide closure rate. To support its slanted claims, the article used misleading and inflammatory quotes from ill-informed sources. Furthermore, the writer left out information supplied by my department that would have invalidated the assertions contained in the story.
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This month’s Washingtonian includes a feature story about Homicide Watch D.C. You can pick it up on newsstands or read it online. Writes Harry Jaffe:

The murder rate in DC has been on a downward trend since 1991, when it peaked at 479, according to police statistics. By 2001, homicides had dropped to 232. In 2011, homicides fell to 108.
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The Washington Times this week published an excellent report on DYRS, the prevalence of committed youths being victims or perpetrators of murder, and the community response.

Reports the Washington Times:

More than 50 D.C. youths in the custody of the city’s juvenile justice agency either have been killed or found guilty of killing someone else over the past five years — and the majority of them had been categorized in advance as posing a “high,” “high-medium” or “medium” risk of reoffending.
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We’ve touched on this before: Since the mid-1990s, violent crime across the United States has dropped dramatically. DC has gone from several hundred murders per year a decade ago to 108 last year.

And yet, experts struggle to explain the drop. Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the answer is actually simple: widespread policies of mass incarceration have taken thousands of criminals off the streets, which both removed violent people from neighborhoods and created a deterrent.
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We saw several summaries this week of news that homicide had fallen off the list of the top 15 ways Americans die.
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This week we bring you two Weekend Reads.
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In 1993, there were 454 murders in Washington, D.C. But in almost every year since, the number of murders has dropped. The same has happened in almost every other major American city, for reasons experts have struggled to explain.

Over the same period, the price of cocaine has plummeted. As the Atlantic Cities explains, this may have made the drug trade just unprofitable enough to take low-level dealers off the streets, and to dramatically reduce the amount of violent crime associated with dealing.Read more

MyFoxDC has this story, which is our Weekend Read this week, about how DYRS ignored a DC judge’s recommendations for Tyronn Garner, a DC youth who was killed in a shooting in Georgetown on Halloween.

“The problem with this particular case” said [Jim Graham], “Is that we don’t know why DYRS management decided not to follow what they had agreed to do Read more