In January 2025, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) released data indicating a dramatic drop in violent crime rates in D.C. in 2024. This comes after the city experienced its deadliest year in more than two decades in 2023, with homicide rates increasing by 35%.
D.C. Council officials and Mayor Muriel Bowser credit the reduction in 2024 to several policies and factors, such as the Secure DC legislation package, violence interruption initiatives, tightened police control, and increased interagency collaboration. However, some nonprofit organizations and legal experts believe that the reduction is part of a general downward trend in U.S. crime, and not specific programs in D.C. The Voice dug into both the data and the different explanations for the decline.
The data
The Voice analyzed the yearly crime incidents published by Open Data and MPD’s year-end crime data and found a 15% reduction in the overall crime rate. Violent crime, including homicide, sexual abuse, assault, and robbery, decreased by 35% in 2024. Robbery cases decreased by the greatest margin—almost 40%. Additionally, the number of homicides fell from 203 cases to 187 cases, the fewest in five years.
While crime rates spiked in 2023, they began declining in January 2024. The rate of reduction peaked in July, with almost 56% fewer violent crimes than in July 2023.
What’s behind the decline?
Some local organizations and D.C. officials argue that the violent crime reduction can be attributed to policies enacted in 2024.
David Muhammad, the Executive Director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR), a nonprofit organization that provides consulting and technical assistance to government and nonprofit agencies, compared D.C.’s crime reduction to other cities.
“D.C.'s reduction was greater than what we saw nationwide. So it's more than just a regression to the mean,” he said.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, the average homicide rate among 29 cities was 16% lower than in 2023. In comparison, D.C.’s homicide rate dropped by 32%.
However, Georgetown Law professor and co-director of the Criminal Justice Clinic Vida Johnson said that crime statistics can be misleading because they are based on measurements taken by the police and are subject to changes based on the facilities. Crime labs analyze data on crime scene fingerprints, forensic biology, and forensic chemistry to provide evidence in criminal cases.
“Police are the ones that decide what the crime rates are,” Johnson said. “For example, while the D.C. crime lab was closed because they lost their certification, there were no arrests, or very few arrests for drug offenses. But then the crime lab opened back up, so now there's drug arrests because there's a place to get those substances analyzed. So crime stats are just so malleable.”
In 2021, the D.C. crime lab lost its credentials following an auditor’s report revealing mistakes in two homicide cases. The lab remained inactive until 2023, when it regained partial accreditation.
According to Muhammad, community violence intervention efforts significantly contributed to violence reduction. Muhammad cited Cure the Streets, a public safety program targeting gun violence, and People of Promise, an initiative that came out of a gun reduction plan published by NICJR in 2022. Cure the Streets is an initiative that employs local, “credible,” outreach workers to deescalate violence, identify “high risk” individuals, and develop individualized risk reduction plans. People of Promise aims to connect D.C. residents most at risk of being victims of or involved in gun violence with support from the city to end cycles of violence. The initiative provides financial assistance, trauma-informed mental health services, and temporary safe housing, among other interventions.
Brooke Pinto (LAW ’17), Ward 2 councilmember and chairperson of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, attributed the reduction partly to the success of Secure DC, a law she proposed in January 2024 and went into effect later that year in March. The initiative’s legislative interventions focused on three categories: crime and violence prevention, accountability for crime, and government coordination.
“I put together a legislative package called Secure DC that had over 100 different legislative interventions in it,” Pinto said. “With all of those interventions, I am so thrilled that we're now seeing crime come way down, and not just down from 2024 to 2023.”
Not all local leaders or D.C. residents are supportive of Secure DC, however. Johnson said that the law may harm D.C. residents, particularly people of color.
“It's clear that the crime reduction that we've seen over the last year is not related to the Secure DC bill,” Johnson said. “We know that the people who are going to suffer the most from this punitive bill are people of color, and some of the aspects of this bill really have nothing to do in any way with crime reduction.”
The D.C. Council Office of Racial Equity published an analysis in January 2024 arguing that Secure DC would exacerbate racial disparities in D.C. The analysis argued that one of the law’s provisions, increasing penalties on existing sentences, would “nearly universally” affect Black residents who are disproportionately incarcerated. Black D.C. residents represent almost 90% of incarcerated people in the District despite making up less than half of its population.
“There's a lot of things in this bill that are really just power grabs for D.C. police, rather than any effort to make the residents of the district any safer,” Johnson said.
One of Secure DC’s initiatives was a rebuttable presumption for pre-trial detention, which means that the law assumes people arrested for violent crimes should be held in jail before trial, though they can challenge this assumption in court.
“We had a system where the presumption was that nobody was held pre-trial, even in the most violent cases,” Pinto said. “So we switched that presumption to say if you've committed some of our most violent crimes; a homicide, rape, crime of violence, the presumption would be following that charge that you're held pre-trial.”
Johnson said that pre-trial detention has serious legal implications.
“It's a bedrock principle of our criminal legal system that when you're merely charged with an offense, you are presumed innocent,” Johnson said. “By having a presumption that someone be detained pre-trial before there's been any adjudication of guilt, that causes serious issues around the presumption of innocence.”
Additionally, Johnson worried that pre-trial detention can have large impacts on individuals’ lives.
“There's also so many downstream consequences of someone being held pre-trial, someone who is legally innocent. So that person will lose their job, they'll lose their housing, they will lose contact with their children,” Johnson said. “The implications of this are enormous, not just on the individual who's accused of a crime, but also on the entire community to which that person belongs.”
A 2022 report by the New York Criminal Justice Agency found that pre-trial detention was highly correlated with a loss in employment, homelessness, and job issues and is negatively associated with family relationships and residential stability.
Going forward
Looking toward the future, D.C. Council and MPD will continue to roll out initiatives with the goal of stemming violent crime, according to Pinto.
“One of the things we have to do is not take our foot off the gas when it comes to the interventions we know are working,” Pinto said. “I'm also really excited to focus on our violence interruption efforts, which I also think show a lot of promise, but are right now not as efficient as I think they could be.”
Pinto said she’s hoping to streamline violence interruption efforts by merging the programs that are currently run separately; People of Promise is run by the mayor’s office while Cure the Streets is run by the attorney general’s office.
Still, the new Trump administration poses uncertainty for the future of the District. D.C.’s lack of statehood enables the president to federalize the MPD, which Trump had hinted at planning to do during his campaign tour in 2024. Some worry that this could affect D.C.’s control over local law enforcement.
“The question is, ‘Is D.C. just made into a political football for no reason?’” Muhammad said. “My concern is it could get caught up in separate politics that distracts from full implementation, but I hope that that doesn't happen.”
