Wrap your arms around this: Washington is on track to become as safe as it was in 1963, measured by the homicide rate.
It was 47 years ago that the number of homicides in the nation’s capital dropped below 100. The number recorded that year was 95.
According to the Metropolitan Police Department, the homicide count as of March 5 was 14. The number last year was 24. That’s a decline of 41 percent.
At that rate, the District could have as few as 84 homicides in 2010, which would put the city three higher than the 81 homicides recorded in 1960, according to MPD stats.
“The tipping point is when we go under 100,” Police Chief Cathy Lanier told me. “It’s still not good enough — but we are getting better.”
Way better than the late 1980s. Marion Barry was mayor. Crack cocaine addiction was epidemic. The police department, starved and corrupted by Barry, was overwhelmed. The cops lost control of many neighborhoods to drug dealers, who settled scores with bullets. The number of homicides was up to 434 in 1989, the year before Barry went to jail on a cocaine rap. It reached its high of 482 in 1991.
The homicide rate has been falling steadily since those bad days. You see the trend in most big cities. Why the decrease in killings?
Criminologists have their theories. They cite demographics. The population is aging. The drug trade has evolved and is more organized. More bad guys are behind bars. Police chiefs credit cops; Lanier has her own theory.
“It’s the community,” she says. “The number of anonymous tips has gone from 282 when I started to 850 last year. People think I’m placating the community when I talk about this, but regular citizens are helping us. They call me. They call the beat officers.
“That’s been huge,” she says.
If Lanier is correct — and it’s a big if — the balance of power in the streets of D.C. may have tipped from the thugs to the cops. For the past decade and more, anyone who talked to police was deemed guilty of snitching, and they might take a bullet for cooperating.
“People don’t feel they are snitching if they know the police officer,” she says. “People were tired of the crime, and they started talking to us.”
Lanier says there were zero cops walking a beat when she became chief three years ago; now there are 380. Residents can call local cops on their cell phones; police are responding to community and neighborhood list serves.
“We respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” she says.
I have my own theory: Street cops and detectives have been working hard to take thugs off the streets. And crime has migrated to the suburbs.
The District is far from becoming a peaceable kingdom, and we are headed into the bloodiest months of the year, but it does feel safer by the month.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
