Charles Allen faces recall effort

[Anonymous]

- As the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, Allen shepherded the D.C. Council's criminal code reform that Congress and President Biden blocked last year.

- It was lambasted for lowering penalties on carjackings, even though the package also increased punishments for other crimes and updated antiquated laws.

Because of the above, I will sign and donate to recall Charles Allen.

[Anonymous]

Frumin has longstanding ties in D politics, have you not read his bio?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The mayor and every council member must be recalled and replaced with true conservatives who will implement sane, tough on crime policies, before DC will ever be worth living in again.

The only electable candidate who has stepped up to challenge someone up for re-election is Lisa Gore @ JLG in Ward 4.

Otherwise, crickets.

Gray announced his retirement from the Ward 7 seat, no credible candidate has stepped forward as of yet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:- As the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, Allen shepherded the D.C. Council's criminal code reform that Congress and President Biden blocked last year.

- It was lambasted for lowering penalties on carjackings, even though the package also increased punishments for other crimes and updated antiquated laws.

Because of the above, I will sign and donate to recall Charles Allen.

For those who would like to be actually informed about what took place last year and how propaganda and misinformation killed that bill, I recommend this article:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-crime/the-war-on-cities

I apologize for the long block of text, but this is a very nuanced situation that many people are trying (like the person above) to simplify:

"And then, in 2020, the commission’s fourteenth year, George Floyd was murdered. States began working to ban choke holds and no-knock warrants, and cities rethought their entire approach to policing. Joe Biden got elected. The following year, the commission submitted its revised criminal code to the D.C. council. “What could go wrong?” Sulton said.

A lot, it turned out. By then, the political winds were shifting. Charles Allen, who was the head of the council’s judiciary committee, was shepherding the new code through a review process. In one meeting, Allen recalled, a fellow council member let out a long sigh when he brought up the bill. “Someone is going to start yelling that we are reducing penalties, that it’s soft on crime,” the lawmaker said. Across the country, Republicans were reclaiming the mantle of law and order—and blaming Democrats for rising crime—as they geared up for the 2022 midterms. In D.C., the local news had a segment almost every day about one specific type of crime that was terrifying many residents: carjacking.

Carjacking? To the commission, it was one of the criminal categories that needed an update. The laws about carjacking stemmed from a gruesome incident that had made national headlines decades ago. In September, 1992, Pamela Basu, a research chemist who lived outside D.C., had been driving her two-year-old daughter to her first day of school. She was at a stop sign when two young men jumped into her BMW. The men threw the baby out of the car, and Basu got tangled in a seat belt and was dragged on the road, for more than a mile, as they sped away. She died from her injuries.

Before Basu, “carjacking” as a legal category didn’t exist—such an incident would just be called a robbery. But a wave of harsh sentencing laws followed. In the District, the council enacted a seven-year minimum for carjacking, fifteen if the perpetrator was armed. It increased the maximum to forty-five years. These changes weren’t out of step with the tough-on-crime attitudes of the era, but the mandatory minimums meant a carjacker could be treated more severely than a murderer. Park and his fellow commission members found that, in reality, judges rarely sentenced carjackers to more than fifteen years. The commission figured that it could cap the penalty at twenty-four years. “Putting it below killing somebody and above just taking their stuff seemed like a reasonable thing to do,” Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University who worked on the advisory board, told me. “Turns out it was toxic.”

Fear about carjacking had seized the District anew. There were a hundred and forty-eight carjackings in 2018; in 2022, there were nearly five hundred. And it wasn’t just carjacking. Although crime statistics in D.C. told an uneven tale—violent crimes and robberies were actually going down, but homicides were on the rise—council members did not want to seem as if they were going soft on crime in the midst of a crisis. Suddenly, the reform bill became politically dangerous.

The commission and the council scrambled to rewrite parts of the code. Hoping to mitigate concerns, they added a mandatory minimum for first-degree murder. Judges and the U.S. Attorney’s office worried that more jury trials would clog their court dockets, so the commission suggested slowly expanding jury demandability over eight years. The office of Muriel Bowser, the District’s mayor, felt strongly about not easing punishment for public urination, so that remained a criminal offense.

The appeasement campaign worked. By the time the code came up for a vote, in November, 2022, all thirteen council members supported it. Allen felt enormous relief. “Then,” he told me, “as we were spending the holidays with our families, I started hearing things.” On January 3rd, Allen learned that Mayor Bowser had chosen to veto the bill. “This bill does not make us safer,” she wrote, in a letter to the council’s chairman. “The Council has gone far beyond the modernization of our criminal laws to include controversial policy proposals best addressed in stand-alone bills where the public can review them and offer their thoughts.” At a press conference that day, Bowser noted that, “any time there’s a policy that reduces penalties, I think it sends the wrong message.”

Paul Butler, the lawyer from Georgetown who had pushed for the expansion of jury trials, remembered thinking, This is political theatre. The council needed nine votes to overcome Bowser’s veto, and, two weeks later, it did just that. Butler suspected that Bowser knew she could enjoy the benefits of the bill without accepting any of the political fallout. (The mayor declined several requests for an interview about the legislation.)

Phil Mendelson, the council’s chairman, had another worry: the U.S. Congress, which has the ability to strike down the council’s bills. (Self-governance was stripped from the District after Reconstruction, when Dixiecrats feared the power of a voting bloc in a city in which nearly half of registered voters were Black men.) Congress had not formally disapproved of a D.C. bill in more than thirty years, but Mendelson understood that today’s lawmakers were eager to send messages about urban recklessness. Republicans could use Bowser’s veto to paint the council as a group that was so radical, so brazen, that its own mayor wanted to stop them."

[Anonymous]

As we put the blame for crime -- correctly, in my opinion -- on our elected officials, we should also focus attention on the lobbying groups that supported these so-called progressive candidates. Greater Greater Washington put significant $$ into backing candidates who not only promote development but who have consistently demonized the police and labeled residents racist when they raised concerns about crime. If we want real progress in this city, we have to start by making our streets safe again.

[Anonymous]

There are quite a few elected officials who deserve to be recalled. Frumin has at least gotten religion on this issue and now says crime is worse than it's ever been in the city.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are quite a few elected officials who deserve to be recalled. Frumin has at least gotten religion on this issue and now says crime is worse than it's ever been in the city.

The bar you people have for recalls...it's like sports talk radio in here

[Anonymous]

The expansion of jury trials was one of the dumber parts of that bill. DC doesn't have a large enough population now to field enough jury trials. Expanding jury trials would certainly result in the fed and local prosecutors having an lower rate of prosecutions than they do now---and their current rate is horrific. Carjackings SHOULD be a separate category from armed robbery precisely because of the heightened risk of the victims (including kids) getting dragged and otherwise harmed. It was just last year that the young doctor in Adams Morgan was run over by his carjackers. And let's not forget the two teens who dragged the 62 yo uber eats driver to his death the year before that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:- As the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, Allen shepherded the D.C. Council's criminal code reform that Congress and President Biden blocked last year.

- It was lambasted for lowering penalties on carjackings, even though the package also increased punishments for other crimes and updated antiquated laws.

Because of the above, I will sign and donate to recall Charles Allen.

For those who would like to be actually informed about what took place last year and how propaganda and misinformation killed that bill, I recommend this article:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-crime/the-war-on-cities

I apologize for the long block of text, but this is a very nuanced situation that many people are trying (like the person above) to simplify:

"And then, in 2020, the commission’s fourteenth year, George Floyd was murdered. States began working to ban choke holds and no-knock warrants, and cities rethought their entire approach to policing. Joe Biden got elected. The following year, the commission submitted its revised criminal code to the D.C. council. “What could go wrong?” Sulton said.

A lot, it turned out. By then, the political winds were shifting. Charles Allen, who was the head of the council’s judiciary committee, was shepherding the new code through a review process. In one meeting, Allen recalled, a fellow council member let out a long sigh when he brought up the bill. “Someone is going to start yelling that we are reducing penalties, that it’s soft on crime,” the lawmaker said. Across the country, Republicans were reclaiming the mantle of law and order—and blaming Democrats for rising crime—as they geared up for the 2022 midterms. In D.C., the local news had a segment almost every day about one specific type of crime that was terrifying many residents: carjacking.

Carjacking? To the commission, it was one of the criminal categories that needed an update. The laws about carjacking stemmed from a gruesome incident that had made national headlines decades ago. In September, 1992, Pamela Basu, a research chemist who lived outside D.C., had been driving her two-year-old daughter to her first day of school. She was at a stop sign when two young men jumped into her BMW. The men threw the baby out of the car, and Basu got tangled in a seat belt and was dragged on the road, for more than a mile, as they sped away. She died from her injuries.

Before Basu, “carjacking” as a legal category didn’t exist—such an incident would just be called a robbery. But a wave of harsh sentencing laws followed. In the District, the council enacted a seven-year minimum for carjacking, fifteen if the perpetrator was armed. It increased the maximum to forty-five years. These changes weren’t out of step with the tough-on-crime attitudes of the era, but the mandatory minimums meant a carjacker could be treated more severely than a murderer. Park and his fellow commission members found that, in reality, judges rarely sentenced carjackers to more than fifteen years. The commission figured that it could cap the penalty at twenty-four years. “Putting it below killing somebody and above just taking their stuff seemed like a reasonable thing to do,” Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University who worked on the advisory board, told me. “Turns out it was toxic.”

Fear about carjacking had seized the District anew. There were a hundred and forty-eight carjackings in 2018; in 2022, there were nearly five hundred. And it wasn’t just carjacking. Although crime statistics in D.C. told an uneven tale—violent crimes and robberies were actually going down, but homicides were on the rise—council members did not want to seem as if they were going soft on crime in the midst of a crisis. Suddenly, the reform bill became politically dangerous.

The commission and the council scrambled to rewrite parts of the code. Hoping to mitigate concerns, they added a mandatory minimum for first-degree murder. Judges and the U.S. Attorney’s office worried that more jury trials would clog their court dockets, so the commission suggested slowly expanding jury demandability over eight years. The office of Muriel Bowser, the District’s mayor, felt strongly about not easing punishment for public urination, so that remained a criminal offense.

The appeasement campaign worked. By the time the code came up for a vote, in November, 2022, all thirteen council members supported it. Allen felt enormous relief. “Then,” he told me, “as we were spending the holidays with our families, I started hearing things.” On January 3rd, Allen learned that Mayor Bowser had chosen to veto the bill. “This bill does not make us safer,” she wrote, in a letter to the council’s chairman. “The Council has gone far beyond the modernization of our criminal laws to include controversial policy proposals best addressed in stand-alone bills where the public can review them and offer their thoughts.” At a press conference that day, Bowser noted that, “any time there’s a policy that reduces penalties, I think it sends the wrong message.”

Paul Butler, the lawyer from Georgetown who had pushed for the expansion of jury trials, remembered thinking, This is political theatre. The council needed nine votes to overcome Bowser’s veto, and, two weeks later, it did just that. Butler suspected that Bowser knew she could enjoy the benefits of the bill without accepting any of the political fallout. (The mayor declined several requests for an interview about the legislation.)

Phil Mendelson, the council’s chairman, had another worry: the U.S. Congress, which has the ability to strike down the council’s bills. (Self-governance was stripped from the District after Reconstruction, when Dixiecrats feared the power of a voting bloc in a city in which nearly half of registered voters were Black men.) Congress had not formally disapproved of a D.C. bill in more than thirty years, but Mendelson understood that today’s lawmakers were eager to send messages about urban recklessness. Republicans could use Bowser’s veto to paint the council as a group that was so radical, so brazen, that its own mayor wanted to stop them."

Oh no you don’t. No COVID level revisionism here. Allen knew of the Mayors and chiefs objections BEFORE the Council vote. Not during the holidays. The receipts are out there if anyone cares to look.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:- As the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, Allen shepherded the D.C. Council's criminal code reform that Congress and President Biden blocked last year.

- It was lambasted for lowering penalties on carjackings, even though the package also increased punishments for other crimes and updated antiquated laws.

Because of the above, I will sign and donate to recall Charles Allen.

For those who would like to be actually informed about what took place last year and how propaganda and misinformation killed that bill, I recommend this article:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-crime/the-war-on-cities

I apologize for the long block of text, but this is a very nuanced situation that many people are trying (like the person above) to simplify:

"And then, in 2020, the commission’s fourteenth year, George Floyd was murdered. States began working to ban choke holds and no-knock warrants, and cities rethought their entire approach to policing. Joe Biden got elected. The following year, the commission submitted its revised criminal code to the D.C. council. “What could go wrong?” Sulton said.

A lot, it turned out. By then, the political winds were shifting. Charles Allen, who was the head of the council’s judiciary committee, was shepherding the new code through a review process. In one meeting, Allen recalled, a fellow council member let out a long sigh when he brought up the bill. “Someone is going to start yelling that we are reducing penalties, that it’s soft on crime,” the lawmaker said. Across the country, Republicans were reclaiming the mantle of law and order—and blaming Democrats for rising crime—as they geared up for the 2022 midterms. In D.C., the local news had a segment almost every day about one specific type of crime that was terrifying many residents: carjacking.

Carjacking? To the commission, it was one of the criminal categories that needed an update. The laws about carjacking stemmed from a gruesome incident that had made national headlines decades ago. In September, 1992, Pamela Basu, a research chemist who lived outside D.C., had been driving her two-year-old daughter to her first day of school. She was at a stop sign when two young men jumped into her BMW. The men threw the baby out of the car, and Basu got tangled in a seat belt and was dragged on the road, for more than a mile, as they sped away. She died from her injuries.

Before Basu, “carjacking” as a legal category didn’t exist—such an incident would just be called a robbery. But a wave of harsh sentencing laws followed. In the District, the council enacted a seven-year minimum for carjacking, fifteen if the perpetrator was armed. It increased the maximum to forty-five years. These changes weren’t out of step with the tough-on-crime attitudes of the era, but the mandatory minimums meant a carjacker could be treated more severely than a murderer. Park and his fellow commission members found that, in reality, judges rarely sentenced carjackers to more than fifteen years. The commission figured that it could cap the penalty at twenty-four years. “Putting it below killing somebody and above just taking their stuff seemed like a reasonable thing to do,” Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University who worked on the advisory board, told me. “Turns out it was toxic.”

Fear about carjacking had seized the District anew. There were a hundred and forty-eight carjackings in 2018; in 2022, there were nearly five hundred. And it wasn’t just carjacking. Although crime statistics in D.C. told an uneven tale—violent crimes and robberies were actually going down, but homicides were on the rise—council members did not want to seem as if they were going soft on crime in the midst of a crisis. Suddenly, the reform bill became politically dangerous.

The commission and the council scrambled to rewrite parts of the code. Hoping to mitigate concerns, they added a mandatory minimum for first-degree murder. Judges and the U.S. Attorney’s office worried that more jury trials would clog their court dockets, so the commission suggested slowly expanding jury demandability over eight years. The office of Muriel Bowser, the District’s mayor, felt strongly about not easing punishment for public urination, so that remained a criminal offense.

The appeasement campaign worked. By the time the code came up for a vote, in November, 2022, all thirteen council members supported it. Allen felt enormous relief. “Then,” he told me, “as we were spending the holidays with our families, I started hearing things.” On January 3rd, Allen learned that Mayor Bowser had chosen to veto the bill. “This bill does not make us safer,” she wrote, in a letter to the council’s chairman. “The Council has gone far beyond the modernization of our criminal laws to include controversial policy proposals best addressed in stand-alone bills where the public can review them and offer their thoughts.” At a press conference that day, Bowser noted that, “any time there’s a policy that reduces penalties, I think it sends the wrong message.”

Paul Butler, the lawyer from Georgetown who had pushed for the expansion of jury trials, remembered thinking, This is political theatre. The council needed nine votes to overcome Bowser’s veto, and, two weeks later, it did just that. Butler suspected that Bowser knew she could enjoy the benefits of the bill without accepting any of the political fallout. (The mayor declined several requests for an interview about the legislation.)

Phil Mendelson, the council’s chairman, had another worry: the U.S. Congress, which has the ability to strike down the council’s bills. (Self-governance was stripped from the District after Reconstruction, when Dixiecrats feared the power of a voting bloc in a city in which nearly half of registered voters were Black men.) Congress had not formally disapproved of a D.C. bill in more than thirty years, but Mendelson understood that today’s lawmakers were eager to send messages about urban recklessness. Republicans could use Bowser’s veto to paint the council as a group that was so radical, so brazen, that its own mayor wanted to stop them."

Oh no you don’t. No COVID level revisionism here. Allen knew of the Mayors and chiefs objections BEFORE the Council vote. Not during the holidays. The receipts are out there if anyone cares to look.

You're welcome to rebut with data. lol at oh know you don't like I'm a dog about to eat your dinner

[Anonymous]

So much energy wasted on statehood. We'll never see that. Another control board is more likely. Current officials have run the city into the ground.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are quite a few elected officials who deserve to be recalled. Frumin has at least gotten religion on this issue and now says crime is worse than it's ever been in the city.

The bar you people have for recalls...it's like sports talk radio in here

Almost a thousand carjackings. More murders than we've seen in 25 years. That's a low bar? No wonder crime has skyrocketed when criminals have friends like you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are quite a few elected officials who deserve to be recalled. Frumin has at least gotten religion on this issue and now says crime is worse than it's ever been in the city.

The bar you people have for recalls...it's like sports talk radio in here

Almost a thousand carjackings. More murders than we've seen in 25 years. That's a low bar? No wonder crime has skyrocketed when criminals have friends like you.

Can't believe Charles Allen jacked all those cars and murdered all those people!

[Anonymous]

Curious to see how this will play out in Ward 6

[Anonymous]

A few things:

- Allen and Mendo screwed up badly in the public discussion of the crime bill, and they allowed a bill that people viewed as soft in crime to go to the mayor and overrode her veto. This is a public perception problem (the bill was not universally soft on crime though some aspects of it can be seen that way), but that doesn't mean they aren't culpable! Part of their job is explaining and justifying laws to citizens. They did a piss poor job of it, especially Allen, because they aren't great communicators or politicians. This is their fault. Even if you think the bill was good, their failure to control the narrative around it is still a failure.

- Regarding carjacking specifically, while you can explain their decision to lower minimums for carjacking, you also have to look at what has happened. Carjacking has absolutely increased exponentially in the district. There are several reasons for this, but one is the perception that it's no longer punished as aggressively as it once was. Even if you disagree with what the minimums uses to be, surely you can see the normative problem with sending the message that you are making carjacking LESS punishable. In this way, the crime bill absolutely led to more crime because it sent the message that the city was less interested in punishing this specific crime. Again, this is a messaging mistake more than a pilicy-making mistake (carjackings rise without the law even taking effect, and the changes in the law mostly just codified what judges were already doing with sentencing). It's still mistake.

- Regarding