D.C. Crime Study: 'Existing Laws Unenforced'

Rampant crime in Washington, D.C., is a product of insufficient funding but also of a city that is doing less with less, according to a recent report conducted by the Manhattan Institute.

Fewer cops are making fewer arrests, prosecutors convert serious offenses down to misdemeanors, and fewer judges are in place to handle the backlog of cases that are brought, criminal justice policy researcher Charles Fain Lehman found in his study.

"The past several years of efforts to solve D.C.'s crime problems show that officials believe that criminal offenders are reacting to a lack of stiff penalties," Lehman wrote in his report. "But the problem is not leniency; the problem is that, across the criminal-justice system, existing laws are unenforced."

Lehman told the National Review, "I really just wanted to dig into the data and say what is actually happening in D.C. and what is plausibly causing that to happen."

Lehman traced the genesis of the problem to the city council's decision to slash the Metropolitan Police Department's budget by $15 million in 2020 amid the "defund the police" movement stemming from the death of George Floyd. Lehman proposed Congress should invest $15 million annually over the next four years on top of MPD's existing funding to help with staffing.

But he also wrote the problems extend beyond funding.

"The District of Columbia still has one of the highest police-to-population ratios of any major city, suggesting that there is inadequate effort per police officer," he wrote. "Indeed, the number of arrests per officer fell as well, from about 0.7 per month before March 2020 to about 0.4 per month as of late 2022. In other words, there are fewer cops, and the cops who are there are doing less."

Lehman distilled it down to "the amount of effort that the various components of the criminal-justice system dedicate — and are able to dedicate — to reducing crime."

"The solution, consequently, is to improve the capacity of that system to operate. That means encouraging the people and institutions that operate that system to do more. But it also means giving them more power to do more. Such a 'capacity view' should be the starting point of the discussion of crime control in the District," he wrote in his conclusion.