WASHINGTON — New crime numbers in D.C. show a steep drop. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, when compared to this time last year homicides, assaults, and carjackings have all fallen.
D.C.’s top prosecutor is hopeful the District is finally falling into line with the drop in crime seen across the country last year.
Back in October, WUSA9 sat down with US attorney for DC Matthew Graves. At the time, critics said his office of prosecutors had low charging numbers for the people arrested in the District. A number that hovered at 53%
The critique was the charging rate contributed to the spike in violent crime in D.C. Even then, Graves disagreed.
“We’re doing everything in our lane to attack the crisis we’re seeing,” he said in October.
Thursday, Graves brought fresh numbers. His team charging roughly 55% of all arrests, similar numbers to what they did during the summer crime spike of 2023.
“Even though that’s consistently been the number we’ve been charging for the last nine months,” he said. “We’ve seen a dramatic change.”
So compared to this point in 2023, D.C. has seen a 36% drop in homicides. A 34% drop in assaults and a 30% drop in carjackings. All that with a similar arrest to charge rate from last year. Graves said there is a different number to study for crime in D.C.
“Ninety percent of people arrested for violent crimes with firearms are charged at the time,” he pointed out. “The limited number who are not, we continue to investigate.”
During the meeting, Graves and his team pointed out all cities in America saw a pandemic boom for crime. But, when crime fell off in 2023 for nearly all American cities, D.C.’s crime pushed higher.
Graves pointed out a number of potential factors, some of which have been reported before like proliferation of guns, overload on the D.C. courts, the loss of accreditation of DC’s Crime Lab, among many other.
“If you have a surge in crime and guns and you don’t have system that’s built to adequately deal with, it its gonna take you longer to deal with it than your neighbor who has a different system,” Graves said of the comparisons between DC and other cities.
Graves looked at the new crime numbers with hope. He said with help from the Secure DC bill as continued work with police and the mayor’s office, he hopes D.C. will finally see its massive crime drop in 2024.