Charles Allen faces recall effort

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02/04/2024 14:20

Subject: Charles Allen faces recall effort

Anonymous

From Charles Allen's latest email to constituents:
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Public Safety Update

This will be a longer update on public safety, but one I hope is helpful at the top of this new year as we all demand solutions to reverse the dramatic increase in violent crime DC experienced last year and we focus urgency around driving down crime in our city. While MPD is reporting an 18% decrease in violent crime in Ward 6 year-to-date, that's nowhere near good enough, and if you or someone you know has been victimized, it also means little. Bottom line: we need to see a serious decline in 2024.

I want to begin by sharing an update on the horrific violent events on Monday night near the Convention Center and in NoMa. One individual committed multiple shootings early last week (two fatal and one at a police officer parked in his squad car who was thankfully unharmed) and multiple carjackings that stretched between DC and Maryland before it ended in a fatal shootout with Maryland police the next morning. It's hard to understand, let alone explain. It's simply horrific. Families are grieving a loss they'll never be able to overcome, and I've talked with several neighbors rocked by the violence that took place. I also knew one of the victims, the wonderful man shot downtown who passed away last night - Mike Gill - through his service on the DC Board of Elections for many years when I had oversight of the agency. He was an exceptional public servant who helped get the District through major changes in elections operations during the pandemic, and my thoughts are with his family, and the Board of Elections family, as well. On Thursday evening, the shooter's name was released publicly, and reporters were quickly able to look up that he had been arrested in 2021 for making felony threats to kill officers responding to a shooting. He verbally threatened to kill the officers, but after the arrest, the federal USAO reduced the charge to a misdemeanor, ultimately didn't proceed with the case, and he was released. Although I don't know the specifics of the evidence in that case, it's a good example of a central challenge that helps make DC unique in a way we don't want to be: too many people aren't experiencing consequences for their actions, nor are there efforts after cases aren't charged to prevent the next violent act before it happens. That's the theme of this section.

On Tuesday night, the Hill Rag hosted an important discussion on juvenile carjacking, building off two in-depth pieces they published late last year - read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. They invited me to moderate the conversation featuring MPD leadership, our federal US Attorney, our local Attorney General, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a community group working with at-risk youth, and a foster father who had seen first-hand the District's failings in holding his own foster child accountable and providing services when the child was arrested for a carjacking. If you weren't able to tune in, you can watch here.

I had a few takeaways from the panel that I think reflect conversations I often have with Ward 6 residents. One of the big questions was why 2023 was a major departure from national trends (most cities saw a notable decline in violent crime), as well as a departure from our own experience with decreased crime in 2022 here in the District, where nearly every crime category had fallen or was close to falling, compared to 2021. Of course, the crime levels in 2021 and 2022 weren't acceptable, but they did fall more in line with national trends.

This kind of analysis is important because it helps us find solutions. Public safety, especially with DC's unique system, is complex. And pretending simple fixes exist isn't a serious way to attack the problem. So what happened in 2023?

I'll start quickly with a few areas in which I see a lot of confusion or misinformation:

The District actually hasn't lowered any criminal penalties on the books in years, including for carjacking, which remains one of the longest penalties anywhere in the United States, with up to 40 years of incarceration for armed carjacking. In fact, I've passed legislation that increased criminal penalties for gun crimes, banned ghost guns and bump stocks, and made penalties more severe for extended gun clips and dangerous automatic weapons. On the whole, people convicted of a crime in DC serve longer sentences than in most other states, especially when we talk about our most serious offenses. So if these increases are happening while our sentences stay the same, something else is going on.

Every sentencing reform the Council has passed in recent memory has been law dating back to 2016, 2018, or 2021 at the latest, if not earlier. While no law should be considered immune to changes or updates, there's no evidence that these sentencing laws, all of which can only be used at the discretion of Superior Court judges, impacted 2023 crime rates, especially as several reforms applied to middle-aged or elderly individuals, not young people who are exponentially more likely to commit violent crimes. In fact, the District paid for an analysis of reoffense rates, which showed no connection between those arrested for carjackings, for example, and individuals being resentenced by judges under these laws. Specifically related to police accountability reforms, the District is also hardly alone in our efforts to balance policing needs with commonsense laws passed to ban chokeholds, expand transparency, and improve accountability for officers found to have committed serious misconduct like domestic violence and sexual assault. Many jurisdictions saw declines in violent crime and put in place similar reforms since 2020.

MPD's staffing challenges stem from low hiring numbers, something nearly every department in the nation struggles with. I passed a law to require MPD to publish data on hiring and attrition, and that data (FY18-FY24 is here) shows that voluntary reasons for leaving, retirements, resignations, and senior separations (when a veteran officer stayed on past their retirement as a "senior officer"), dating back to 2014 have been largely been steady over that nine year stretch -- with last year, FY23, showing one of the lowest numbers of departures from the department. In that nine year stretch, departures were highest in FY15 and FY16. Our challenge now is that it still outpaces hiring trends, with 316 total separations in FY23 but only 193 hires (and that's with MPD's fully requested hiring budget being approved by the Council, including $25k signing bonuses and tuition and housing incentives).

I also see DC Superior Court judges questioned on their sentencing decisions, but in close to 95% of all cases with a sentence, judges are what we call "Guideline-compliant", meaning they follow DC's voluntary Sentencing Guidelines. These Guidelines are developed by the D.C. Sentencing Commission based on past sentences and the penalties in law, and factor in the defendant's criminal history, the severity of the offense, and any mitigating factors (like self-defense) or exacerbating ones (motivated by a hate crime or clear bias). A further wrinkle here is that in every year since 2014, U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutors have reached a plea agreement in roughly 9 out of every 10 convictions secured. By its very nature, a plea agreement almost always involves a downgrade in the charge, as very few people plea to the most serious consequences they face -- which can result in a shorter sentence and a lower criminal history score when evaluating any new offenses.

The Lack of Swift and Certain Consequences

So what was unique about the District compared to its peers in 2023? The bottom line is we aren't seeing anything close to "swift and certain consequences" that we know are essential to deterring illegal and dangerous behavior. That means people aren't being caught, or if they are, the charges aren't being prosecuted. And we're not focusing all of our efforts on the "hot people" in our neighborhoods. In a theme that was extremely clear during the panel, coordination between government agencies is poor. This is why the District needs to adopt a strategic gun violence reduction plan immediately, and Executive Branch agencies must coordinate with focus on the small number of individuals responsible for most violent crime.

Some of this inevitably stems from the biggest reason DC is an outlier -- we're the only jurisdiction in the US where the federal government and the local government split core responsibilities in the criminal justice system:

Federal: courts, many police departments, adult prosecution, prison for local felonies, monitoring defendants on pre-trial release in the community, parole, clemency, US Marshals, and Court Social Services, which works with a good part of the youth in the criminal justice system.

Local: MPD, crime lab, victim support, violence intervention programs, DC Attorney General (juvenile crimes and some adult violations including traffic), DC Jail (for sentences under one year or holding during trial), and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, which works with the rest of the youth in the criminal justice system.

It would be hard to design a more convoluted public safety system if you tried. And even if everyone has the best intentions, the result means inevitably a less coordinated effort that often lets people slip through the cracks and experience little to no accountability or rehabilitation and intervention. It also means the Council can't pass laws dictating how federal agencies operate. Even with the best of partnerships, federal agencies ultimately don't answer to DC residents, and even simple steps like requiring information-sharing to help bring transparency to the full system are ignored. That doesn't mean there's nothing we can do; we just have to constantly work together collaboratively to push in the same direction and, again, with strategic focus.

All of this means that people who commit harm often aren't experiencing swift and certain accountability.

So How Can We Have a Safer 2024?

This has already been a very long public safety update from me, so I'll just hit a few points where I have hope, as well as areas where we need to see improvement, in the coming year. I'll also keep sharing more actions in future newsletters:

First, our Department of Forensic Sciences was reaccredited for processing drugs and biological evidence like DNA at the end of December. I've written legislation reforming the crime lab and pushing it to regain its accreditation. This is big and will allow many criminal cases to be tested again in DC rather than dropped, put on the backburner, or farmed out to private labs for analysis.

Second, MPD hiring is improving, despite the gap between hiring and attrition, and our cadet pipeline is growing. The number of officers last year who left the force was one of the lowest in the past nine years, and at the Council, the expanded DC's cadet pipeline from 15 to 150 new cadets per year, something I made a priority during previously when I used to be Chair of the Judiciary Committee.

Third, with the recent announcement of an infusion of support and needed resources from the Department of Justice, I hope we see USAO bringing more cases and lowering their declination rates. As a reminder, USAO is our federal prosecutor, part of the Department of Justice. Of course, we want to see these be strong cases, and as I've said before many times, the communication and collaboration between prosecutors and police officers needs to be a priority.

In December, MPD announced a real-time crime center and entered into agreement with many of the federal law enforcement agencies in the District. This is an encouraging start to seeing improved coordination in our public safety response.

I remain concerned that DC is resource-rich, but coordination-poor. We haven't had a new Director of the Mayor's Office of Gun Violence Prevention since the sudden and tragic passing of its first director, Linda Harllee Harper last May. The Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement has had an interim leader for too long. Both of these critical vacancies tell me that gun violence prevention isn't nearly the priority it needs to be. In 2021, DC paid for the strategic gun violence reduction plan I mentioned above, and in an update of that report released this week, the report's author told NBC4 the District has failed to take aggressive steps to implement that plan. Accountability is hard to achieve if our agencies don't work together with a common plan and purpose.

Secure DC Vote on Tuesday

On the Council side, on Tuesday, we'll have our first vote on Councilmember Pinto's Secure DC legislation. This is a massive bill, and I shared some aspects of the bill I feel strongly about and my intent to support the final package in the last newsletter. If you want to share your view, just reply to this email.