Safe Communities for Everyone
Every DC resident in every neighborhood deserves to be safe, and DC must drive down crime while protecting all of our communities. Every person we lose to gun violence is one person too many. And right now, too many of our neighbors are being kidnapped by masked federal agents on our streets. The trust needed to make our communities safe is broken when local police are ordered to support ICE. Our efforts to hold people accountable for violent crime are undermined as DC struggles to close cases and repeated errors in DC’s crime lab compromise prosecutions. Our agencies are failing to keep kids in school — where they are safest — or to get kids back on the right path after they offend. And during emergencies when every second matters, 911 calls go unanswered or routed to the wrong location far too often.
We know what makes DC safer: focusing on accountability, prevention, and community trust. As Mayor I’ll focus on deterring crime through community policing and by filling the hundreds of police officer positions that DC has already funded. I’ll focus on ending MPD cooperation with ICE so our officers can focus on combating crime. And I’ll focus on mobilizing multiple agencies to implement a comprehensive public safety strategy for each block, as we did successfully for Kennedy Street. Most of the serious crime in DC is committed by a small number of high-risk individuals who are already known to us. Arresting them after a crime has been committed is not enough — we also need to make positive interventions in their lives to prevent crime from happening in the first place.
As Mayor, I’ll build on my work deploying resources strategically in ways that drive down crime, restore community trust, improve agency performance, and prevent crime before it happens.