The number of homicides around the Washington region in 2009 has dropped 25.5 percent compared with last year, and the District of Columbia is expected to go down as having the fewest number of killings in more than four decades.
It’s a nationwide trend: New York and San Francisco are boasting of record-low numbers of homicides while Los Angeles and Chicago saw theirs drop by 11 percent.
As of Dec. 30, the District has had 138 homicides, the lowest number since 1964, when the city earned “Murder Capital on the Potomac” nickname. Prince George’s County’s number of homicides dropped from 116 to 91 this year.
Regionwide, there were 271 homicides this year compared with 364 in 2008.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has attributed the decline in D.C. to hard-working police officers, a high homicide-closure rate, better coordination among neighboring agencies and influx of technology that has allowed officers to respond quickly to crimes and get the criminals before they cause more harm.
Armed with information, police can better predict where crimes might happen and take measures to prevent them, Lanier has said.
Criminologists will be combing over the data to figure out why numbers went down so dramatically around the country.
“It’s great news. It’s almost as good as it gets,” said George Washington University criminologist Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor. “But it’s probably not the result of one particular police strategy because it’s going down in all jurisdictions in the D.C. area.”
Butler said factors that criminologists will consider when trying to explain the drop in homicides includes:
— the number of guns on the streets;
— demographics, such as the number of males between the ages of 15 to 25 years (most likely to commit homicides);
— the length of sentences inmates are serving;
— economic conditions;
— unseasonable weather.
Homicides in Fairfax County dropped from 22 to 11 at this time last year. Montgomery County had 13 compared with 21 last year.
After going up the previous two years, the District’s number of homicides plummeted 25.8 percent in 2009. Since 1991, when the city had 479 slayings, the number of homicides has dropped by 71 percent.
New York City is on pace to have 461 homicides in 2009, compared with a high of 2,245 in 1990.
