A District panel developed after a spate of murders committed by fugitive juveniles hasn’t met more than 15 months after the law establishing it went into force, the city’s inspector general has found. “There have been no findings and recommendations since the act’s implementation … that address the continuing threat to the safety and well-being of absconding youths and all other District residents,” investigators wrote.
After 15 Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services wards were charged with homicide in a one-year stretch, city leaders ordered the agency to establish a committee to review serious crimes involving absconders.
The law creating the panel said it was to review cases of juvenile absconders committing homicide, assault with intent to kill or assault with a firearm. The committee was also to examine cases in which an absconder was the victim of those crimes.
But more than a year after the law took effect, city investigators found that DYRS has taken only tentative steps to organize the committee.
“The Juvenile Abscondence Review Committee has not yet been organized, and its members’ roles and responsibilities are unclear,” investigators wrote.
The department said Mayor Vincent Gray’s office had hamstrung the process by not appointing the panel’s public member and not signing an executive order detailing how the group would organize and function.
“DYRS officials stated they had contacted the mayor’s office, but there had been no follow-up by the mayor,” the report said, adding that Gray’s office did not respond to repeated questions from the inspector general’s office.
D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan’s office, though, thought Gray’s role in establishing the committee was minimal. Investigators found that Nathan’s office told DYRS that an additional order from Gray “was not required because the act already defines the [committee’s] duties, composition and functions.”
DYRS also told investigators that only one incident would have qualified for a committee examination, but the inspector general, using reports from The Washington Examiner and other news outlets, said the panel would have had at least 15 cases to review.SClBDYRS Director Neil Stanley slammed the inspector general in a May 17 letter, saying the department was “troubled” by investigators’ findings.
Stanley objected to the inspector general using newspaper reports to verify the agency’s data and wrote that investigators “could have extended more courtesy to DYRS.”
In a separate statement to The Examiner on Friday, a DYRS spokeswoman said the agency expected to name the committee “in a matter of days.”SClBWard 6 Councilman Tommy Wells, one of the authors of the law that created the committee, said he was “disappointed” by the panel’s status.
“The whole point of the review committee is to review abscondences and give the public confidence,” Wells said through a spokesman. “At the end of the day, this group has to meet.”
