WASHINGTON — DC Mayor Muriel Bowser returned from an overseas trip to questions about her crime bill Monday. The Addressing Crime Trends Now Act was introduced last month and debated last week in a Judiciary Committee hearing. The Mayor fired back against critics who said her proposals do little to address our crime crisis.
“We spent three years disrupting our echo system and it’s really out of whack,” said Mayor Bowser.
The mayor said some of the actions by the DC Council during the pandemic got us where we are today: Criminals, she said are not being held accountable and the police budget was slashed. Now she believes the three crime bills before the council will get the city back on track.
“It won’t be a single thing, but I will tell you every time I see gaps in our law that I believe are making us unsafe I will advance those to the Council,” said Bowser.
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said the package of crime bills could be combined to make one catch-all omnibus legislation. However, the Mayor’s proposal, he said, misses the mark.
“The legislation the Mayor introduced deals very little, if at all, with what's top of mind for residents which are homicides, carjackings, and robberies,” said Mendelson. “Yes, there are some good ideas. But no this is not the short-term big change that we can see in regard to reducing the violent crime.”
The ACT Now legislation calls for changes to police policy around car chases, and neck restraints, and it would give officers the ability to view their body-worn camera footage *before writing an incident report. And what the mayor calls emerging crime trends.
“These ski masks, retail theft, and open-air drug dealing,” Bowser explained, “that’s what residents of the District care about!”
But many residents overwhelmingly expressed concern about the proposed drug-free zones and possible civil rights violations when testified before the council hearing last week.
“It just doesn’t work for us to implement legislation that can’t be implemented it gives false hope,” said Mendelson.
The chairman called the proposal “constitutionally suspect” and said drug-free zones were repealed 10 years ago because of it. Mayor Bowser was a Ward 4 council member when she voted for the repeal a decade ago. Mendelson suggested the Judiciary Committee will likely move a crime package forward at the beginning of the new year.
“We want the law to be as strong as possible to enable police and prosecutors to fight crime, but we have to get it right,” he said.