Washington mitigates criminals in law too lenient even for Democratic mayor

“Catch and release” is one way to describe poor immigration enforcement. But in the capital of the country, unfortunately, this phrase is applicable to almost all types of crimes, including the most cruel ones.

Washington DC is experiencing a homicide boom, with more than 200 homicides a year in 2021 and 2022. And each of the last five years, there have been more car thefts than the year before.

From 2021 to 2022, the number of reported car thefts increased by 36%. Nearly three-quarters of these incidents involved the use of firearms, and 70% were committed by minors, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

How will the city council respond to this wave of crime? Reduce sentences and end prosecutions—even against the objections of the Democratic Mayor of the District of Columbia.

On Tuesday, the council passed its revised Penal Code Act over a veto by Mayor Muriel Bowser, in what was a belated but much-welcomed Christmas present for offenders ranging from petty crooks to car thieves and rapists. The new law removes the mandatory minimum sentence and removes the “three strikes” provisions. Now repeat offenders will have far fewer prison terms to worry about.

It doesn’t take much math to figure out what putting more of these people back on the street for longer periods of time will mean for violent crime in the area.

Sex offenders are getting a breather too, getting a new chance to get out of jail before they’ve served their full sentences. “I don’t think the D.C. Board should be helping rapists get out of prison early,” Denise Krepp, a local consulting commissioner, told local WUSA9.

“This is crazy,” she said. But such is life in Washington now, where crazy and bad people make life more and more dangerous. The city is spiraling, familiar to those who knew it in the 1980s and early 90s.

Union Station in Washington is a symbol of this terrible descent. Just a few years ago, it prospered thanks to passengers whose dollars supported the station’s increasingly upscale retailing. Now there are no shops and restaurants, and this place has turned into a desert and vagrancy. (Although when President Joe Biden wanted to use the station as a midterm address, the police cleared the hobos for him.)

The national capital is a national disgrace, but an all too fitting depiction of what has happened across the country since the campaign to dishonor the police began.

Since the second term of the Obama administration, Americans have been told that the police are out of control and that racial justice is more important than criminal justice. Liberal Democrats like those on the DC City Council have tried to make life easier for criminals and harder for the police when they can’t directly protect cops.

The result is more homicides, mostly in black neighborhoods, where black children are often the victims of volleys of shots that rival criminals aim (or don’t aim) at each other. These people need to be in jail before they can take their lives. It means doing the opposite of what the DC City Council did—it means locking up delinquents early and for as long as it takes to render them harmless.

Good police and tough laws keep people safe, but safe people feel they can afford to forgive. Republicans, like Democrats, began to pursue “criminal justice reform” during the Obama years, as well as during the Trump years. The D.C. Penal Code contains provisions dating back to 1901, so it was a ripe target for reform.

But the reform the country needs is nothing like what the DC Council has done. The capital, like the country, is in need of reforms in which the priority is to reduce crime, not to reduce the number of prisoners. The racial justice this country needs is justice for the innocent blacks whose lives have been lost because the police weren’t there for the criminals shooting up black neighborhoods. If Black Lives Matter were a philosophy and not a slogan, it would mean empowering the police to bring peace back to our cities.

Washington needs radical reform. But his city council has changed dramatically for the worse. And with a one-party city government, there’s little chance of change, even if Democrats like Mayor Bowser realize how radical many of her party members have become. DC has a long road to good order, and it starts by abandoning the catch-and-release mentality.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.