And how to get it right
If you’ve followed the news about Washington, DC, in the past several years, you may have heard the city has a crime problem. The Washington Post has covered it; so for that matter, has Slow Boring. In an April Post poll, more than 60% of residents described the city’s problem as “extremely” or “very” serious.
The District’s crime wave has attracted attention not just because of its location, but because it has been longer and bigger than that experienced by other major cities, many of which saw violence begin dropping in 2022, and which are back to historic lows in homicide. DC is not, in other words, enjoying the gains that other cities are reaping. There have been positive signs: Violent crime is down over last year, as a wave of carjackings has somewhat abated, and homicides are running below recent highs. But gains there seem to be coming at the expense of quality-of-life issues, like a collapse in traffic enforcement or a large uptick in 311 requests for sanitation enforcement.
But what, actually, can the city — and the federal government constitutionally responsible for it — do about their crime issue? As I argue in a recent Manhattan Institute report, almost everyone has been thinking about the problem wrong. Analyses have tended to focus on a broad “crime” problem, not zooming in on specific problems; solutions have fixated on the severity of the criminal law, whether seeing it as too harsh or too lenient.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Slow Boring
______________________
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Based on a recent report.
Photo by MattGush/Getty Images
