Charles Fain Lehman:
The reality is that in every city in the United States, in every city on Earth, crime is a highly concentrated phenomenon. That’s one of the few iron laws of criminology. In about 10 percent of the blocks in a city, you will see about 50 percent of the crime.
And that’s true in D.C. as well. I have done some research that shows more than half of homicides in 2023 were in just two wards, Ward 7, Ward 8. Just 10 blocks, not 10 percent, just 10 blocks were home to 14 percent of homicides in that year.
So a lot of what the city would like to be able to do, what the federal government ought to be able to do is to concentrate resources there. There are mixed signals about where we’re seeing federal resources. There’s obviously a lot of social media footage of agents in strange places on the National Mall, on U Street. It’s a little bit hard to generalize from that.
The messaging from the administration is, we’re taking criminals off the street. Again, it’s a little bit hard to get a systematic sense. So the other question in my mind that isn’t all answered is, is deploying these federal troops in non-major crime areas freeing up constrained MPD resources to go to those more major crime areas, Ward 7, Ward 8, Northeastern D.C., areas where you have serious entrenched gang violence problems?
I think we have mixed messages about whether that’s really happening and it’s a little bit hard to tell in the proverbial fog of war.
