The head of Washington, D.C.’s police department said this week that the average homicide suspect has previously been arrested 11 times, adding, “we need to keep violent people in jail.”
Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee said during a press conference, when asked if he expected the city to change its tactics in response to a rising homicide rate, that “What [we’ve got to] do if we really want to see homicides go down is keep bad guys with guns in jail.”
He added, “Because when they are in jail, they can’t be in communities shooting people. So when people talk about what we're gonna do different or what we should do different or what we need to do different, that's the thing that we need to do different."
Contee said, “We need to keep violent people in jail. Right now, the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide. That is a problem.”
Contee previously said that "the department has had fewer than 3,400 members since December,” which is “430 fewer officers now than we did in 2019, and likely the lowest number of officers since at least the 1970s.”
He added, “It will take more than a decade to reach 3,800 sworn officers if we are even able to sustain even modest net gains in staffing each year.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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