In DC Black Kids are 10X More Likely to be Jailed as Whites but Black Puppetician Mayor Can't Be Seen as Soft on Crime by White Liberal Residents: Bowser Unable to Explain How More Cops Prevent Crime

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From [HERE] and [HERE] After Mayor Muriel E. Bowser proposed bolstering D.C.’s police force by rerouting $11 million to new officers in the city’s budget, two members of the D.C. Council countered with their own approach: using more than half of that money instead on initiatives based on violence prevention and public health.

Homicides are up in DC, not just by 3 percent over 2020, but 19 percent compared with the same time two years ago. Bowser added a side note: “Compared to the same time last year, the District has witnessed fewer gunshot wound victims, but their injuries have proven more fatal.” How to explain? More lethal weapons? Improved marksmanship?

The data, however, pales in importance to the thrust of Bowser’s report, which is:

  • The courts and U.S. attorney’s office are falling down on the job of holding criminals responsible and delivering justice for violent crime victims. The mayor laid out statistics to support her point: Federal prosecutors report that more than 2,300 matters await formal charges, operating with only two grand juries, as compared with five pre-covid-19. D.C. Superior Court has a 74 percent increase in pending criminal cases vs. two years ago.

  • The stretched-thin Metropolitan Police Department is having a hard time maintaining its presence in neighborhoods hit hardest by violence because the department was slapped with a “$15 million Council-led budget reduction,” causing the pipeline for hiring police to be “ground to nearly a halt.”

And,

  • Bowser’s not going to take it anymore, announcing that she is sending an $11 million supplemental budget request to the council for a vote Aug. 3 for the hiring and training of 170 additional police officers — 20 this fiscal year, and 150 next.

  • Last month a Sentencing Project report found that Black youth in CD are more than ten times as likely to be detained or committed in juvenile facilities as their white peers, which is more than double the nationwide rate. DC is now a majority white, liberal city.

At which point, we should pause.

The center of Bowser’s critique of the criminal justice system is that judges and prosecutors are letting violent criminal suspects back on the streets. Superior Court Chief Judge Anita Josey-Herring has produced her own rebuttal, maintaining that the courts have been up and running, even as covid-19 engulfed the city.

Intrepid local reporters such as Washington City Paper’s Mitch Ryals and NBC4’s Mark Segraves have been dogged in their search for data to back up Bowser’s charge. I, too, have been after the MPD, Bowser’s office and the U.S. attorney’s office to obtain real — not hypothetical or fictional — examples of suspects charged with crimes who reoffended before their cases were resolved. I have also pressed D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine’s office for similar information on youth offenders. And I have watched in amazement at how they dance away from the subject.

But Dance Time is over. Guns keep firing and bodies keep dropping, and the mayhem is not limited to certain Zip codes.

Tuesday will be an important day in the District’s rendezvous with crime. Should the D.C. Council, as Bowser demands, add $11 million to the budget for more police?

No question, many residents, especially in hard-hit neighborhoods, want to see more officers.

But that’s not the main question the mayor — or those carrying the ball for her on Tuesday — must address. They must answer how the addition of 170 — as opposed to 200 or 125 — officers will reduce homicides and robberies. That entails also addressing the issue of reducing the size of the MPD, for reasons recommended by the D.C. Police Reform Commission.